Ngadi Smart’s interdisciplinary practice stretches across collage, photography and illustration to build authentic and essential pictures of contemporary African identity. In 2021, Smart was commissioned to accompany WaterAid for three months in her mother country of Sierra Leone, where 85% of the population is without basic access to sanitation. Smart documents communities that are resiliently adapting to the realities of climate change infiltrating water systems, degrading agricultural land, and forcing adaptation. Smart takes the context of a water crisis, deepened by internal and external corruption and government complacency, and builds a vibrant and lucid foundation for empowerment and change through her photocollage works.

Smart chooses to turn upon its head conventional Western depictions of poverty and hardship to create a visual language of her own that is brimming with vitality alongside tension and questions of power. Wata Na Life is kinetic and unfixed – jubilant and cacophonous collages blending landscape and subject into a post-photographic swell of pride. However, buried within Smart’s blossoming collages is a spikier thorn; tangled images suggest a fragile infrastructure of dependence and support, and jagged contrasts imply the realities of a daily existence where water really is life.

88 pages
220 × 260 mm, 75 colour and duotone plates
Post-folded hand-made book, stab-stitched to raw hard cover with cloth spine
Limited Edition of 500 copies, signed and numbered.
Designed & Published by Loose Joints
LJ199, August 2024
978-1-912719-56-3