•
A Palimpsest of Kosamdi
• A Palimpsest of Kosamdi
May 25, 2025
Photographs by SANA GINWALLA
Kosamdi, a village in Gujarat near Surat, India, is where my paternal grandparents spent most of their lives. This place has inspired nearly every visit I’ve made to India from Zambia over the past 30 years. For the last decade, Kosamdi and my grandparents’ home have been the focus of my documentary photography. The concept of the house fascinates me, and I intentionally photograph it repeatedly on almost every visit, as if a palimpsest of images will permanently imprint its presence in my mind, preventing its erasure.
While I try to capture the house’s quiet charms, I feel an increasing urgency to document not just the house but the village itself, as though doing so will preserve my family’s history. Yet, despite my efforts, I sense a disconnect. Last October, my maternal grandmother, my oldest living ancestor in India, passed away. We spoke different languages in different fluencies, and though my photographs of her since 2014 are a start, they never feel like enough – until she passed.
A palimpsest of images won’t sate me. I want a palimpsest of memory in my body. I have the genes and the bloodline of all my ancestors. What if I had all their memories too?
BEHIND THE LENS
SANA GINWALLA is an Indian-Zambian artist and curator based in Lusaka. She is the founder of the Everyday Lusaka Gallery and Zambia Belonging – art platforms dedicated to shifting towards a more considered visual representation of Zambia’s past and present to build a contemporary archive for future generations. Zambia Belonging is a crowd-sourced counter-archive of photographs from Zambia’s past which beganwith over 1000 forgotten photographs from one of Lusaka’s oldest photo studios. Her artistic and archival work with this collection has been presented at the African Biennale of Photography in Bamako (2022, 2024), the Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre (2023), the University of Oxford (2023), Stranger’s House Gallery, Mumbai (2024), and the University of Cambridge, where she was a Visiting Research Fellow (2023). Ginwalla has independently curated exhibitions at the National Gallery of Zambia (2021), Lusaka National Museum (2021), Alliance Française de Lusaka (2021 to 2022), Zamrock Museum and Modzi Arts Gallery (2023, 2024), and Lechwe Trust Gallery (2024). By engaging the public in her exhibitions, Ginwalla’s curatorial work often transcends the protocols of gallery and museum spaces through participatory installations. She is drawn towards bodies of work that explore heritage, memory, and the family archive. Working in this way allows her to further understand her identity and place in the world and is what she aims to facilitate for others, too.
