MALAWI SERIES
All over Africa, bright colorful wax print fabrics are ubiquitous. Known as chitenge in Malawi and East Africa, these fabrics originated from Dutch wax prints, which took Indonesian batik-inspired designs and applied it to a machine-block printing process. The imagery on the chitenge usually features simple repeat motifs of meaningful local and national symbols.
The chitenge found in Malawi, Africa, today, are now mostly made abroad; in neighboring countries such as Tanzania, or more commonly, in China. Malawi's remaining working fabric mill only produces political chitenges, for local political campaigns and funerals, made on low-quality cotton cloth imported from China. The hand-printed quality of the fabrics has also been lost with the transition to mass-produced rotary screen-printing processes.
My Malawian chitenge series is based on recentering and reanimating the chitenge with symbols and imagery found in the landscape of, and my experience of, contemporary Malawi. Through hand-screenprinting, patterning, and collaging, the fabric chitenges bought in Malawi, but made in China, are re-imagined and re-created to become more relevant to the country today.
