Finishing dates: November 2016 to November 2018.
For a couple of years before I started my PhD, I worked as an assistant in a research project focused on the Volta basin in West Africa. That meant I traveled to Burkina Faso and Ghana to do fieldwork several times. At the time, my mother was living and working in Liberia, so I also visited her a couple of times. I would always come return home from my West African travels with half of my luggage consisting of the incredibly beautiful, colorful West African wax print fabrics. When it comes to colorful textiles, I cannot help myself.
Then, my former master’s thesis co-supervisor Hanna defended her PhD thesis. I wanted to make her a gift. So, I took some of the fabric that I had bought back from Burkina Faso and made her a tote bag. I also designed a logo for her, celebrating that she had received her PhD from Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), inspired by a traditional Burkinabe art style. Using textile paint, I painted the logo onto a piece of white fabric and sew it onto the tote bag. We gave it to her as part of the traditional shared gift from the PhD group.
And then, as it happened, I continued doing this for a couple of years. Designing a logo, somehow representing a graduating PhD student’s research or role in the SRC PhD group, and attaching it to one of their graduation gifts. For most people, that gift was a tote bag that I also made from the West African fabrics. Once I started the fourth year of my own PhD, however, I felt I had too much else on my mind, so I stopped making them. Generally, new ideas excite me more than perfecting old ones, and by 2019 the photography collaboration between me and Natalia had gotten started. That became what I started focusing on instead. But it was fun, for a while, sowing tote bags and coming up with nice, and sometimes funny, logos to celebrate the achievements of my senior PhD group colleagues.
Katja Malmborg 