The Beautyful Ones Always Were

In our ongoing acts of urban interventions of our Postbox Ghana research project, we introduce images from Ghana’s past into contemporary environments as a way of exploring the stories enshrined in vintage photographs, architecture, postal material, and ephemera and their relations to today’s contexts. Thanks to the work of often unnamed photographers active in the 1950s-1960s, we are able to explore issues of authorship, agency, and collective memory.

Nkrumah’s project of modernity involved the construction of monumental socialist-modernist forms as a singular way to define the new country. Yet, there were those understories and undercurrents that persisted and live today. We see those currents in spaces like the constantly-dynamic urban markets and in the failed and derelict monuments of independence that have assumed new lives.

In 2021 and 2023 we intervened in two spaces: the Makola Market in Accra, and the concrete grain silo in Tamale. In these historically significant locations, our introduction, placement and documentation of archival imagery revealed the contradictions between Ghana’s post-independence state-led construction projects and the several “informal”, “unplanned” subaltern space-making cultures that exist today. It became noticeable what is historically represented and what is not, what is present and what is absent.

  • Courage Dzidula Kpodo
    Director
  • Manuela Nebuloni
    Director
  • Courage Dzidula Kpodo
    Writer
  • Manuela Nebuloni
    Writer
  • Postbox Ghana
    Producer
  • Courage Dzidula Kpodo
    Producer
  • Manuela Nebuloni
    Producer
  • Nana Ofosu Adjei
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes 31 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 1, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Ghana
  • Country of Filming:
    Ghana
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Biennale Architettura 2023
    Venice
    Italy
    May 20, 2023
    Guests to the Future session
Director Biography - Courage Dzidula Kpodo, Manuela Nebuloni

Postbox Ghana is a collection of visual references from Ghana’s collective memory, investigated through the aesthetic
possibilities of material culture. Since 2020 we research archival photography, architecture and narratives via
photography mainly produced to be send out of Ghana through its postal ecosystem, an overlooked body of
information, the most popular form of mass communication in the pre-internet era – yet an overlooked body of
information – that registered the construction of a new Ghanaian identity.
Objects are a document of their time: postcards and stamps contain history and capture the spirit of an era: they are
the product of the synergy between the paper world + chemicals + human creativity + politics of communications and
international travel. We collect, research and share everyday documents in an attempt to unpack some of the
embedded narratives in archives, unlock the stories of common people along the decades and make available an
increasing number of visual materials from defining years for the Continent and beyond, while addressing the absence
of easily accessible historic imagery from African in mainstream sources, especially pictures telling every-day stories.
Starting an online platform as a “learning exercise”, we wish to join the conversation around archives, their
importance and need of making them accessible and used by communities. We are interested in distinctive aesthetics,
self-determination and the forms they take.
Postbox Ghana is a research project initiated by Manuela Nebuloni, Courage Dzidula Kpodo and Nana Ofosu Adjei.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The African city is a space of many possibilities of remaking. Its urban infrastructures are the products of specific spatial practices and complex interactions between diverse groups of players: their coexistence shows how urban citizens continuously redefine their positions in a larger field of action. Far from being peripheries to larger urbanizing worlds, African cities are platforms of mediation–negotiations around people assimilating, integrating, consolidating. There is a constant definition and reworking of local and specific ways of thinking and doing things. These characteristics of the African city gives it an urban elasticity which can simultaneously be its strength and its vulnerability. The activities and economies of the African city present potential for a different kind of urban configuration that we are yet to generally know. Adapted from “For the City Yet to Come”—Abdou Maliq Simone, 2018