dream of mud

Portrait of the Mitanga family at dawn.

I wanted the observer should not be an intrusive guest, but that an immediate connection could rise at once between subjects and observer.

A Dream of Mud

Malawi’s bricks (2009) Italian Version

It’s October, the rainy season will be beginning in a month.

At six o’clock the sun is already high and the Mitanga family starts working.

In Malawi, as in the whole continent, wood and mud huts with thatched roof are almost forgotten and the progress replaced them with more modern brick huts with plate roof.

In the villages people get organized to build thousands of bricks by hand. The manufacturing is a hard but simple work.

“Even if I needed the cooperation of my subjects I did not ask them for collaboration, but I constantly adapted to their work, so I lived near the village for three weeks knowing of being an accomplice to have to gain their trust.

To make them understand that I was there, but that they have to behave as I wasn’t there, I gave them some snapshots. Only after being part of the “family” I started to take photographs.”

The Mitanga family wakes up at dawn, women take water to the clay soil while men, with the spade, turn it into mud. The mixture, collected with a primitive tool that gives it shape, measure and consistency, is dried in the sun for the whole week.

Men and women have just one goal: creating bricks to sell at the market.

The dried bricks should be baked in a special oven, whose building is under the responsibility of an expert. The oven is made of about 20 mouths, all in a row and the rows of bricks should not exceed a given height. The most fragile phase is baking. When the oven is ready, whole trunks are introduced into the mouths while women cover its walls with mud so that the heat doesn’t get lost.

Baking bricks is a night ceremony, you stay up all night to control any single mouth: missing this passage is absolutely forbidden. While the bricks get baked, people eat and drink as to celebrate a happy event.

Baking lasts for three days, after which every single brick is ready to be sold for about 10 Malawian Kwacha that is 5 Euro cents.

It’s 6 p.m., it’s sunset while straw has light the oven. Baking has just started.

Water is collected from the well dug entirely by hand that allows to have drinkable water all year long.

I took photographs with the aim to represent the separation of roles, at work, as well as in everyday life.

Men’s hands are swift tools that gather mud and without errors or hesitations distribute it in a mould. I made my mind to isolate gesture from faces, leave out any disturbing or needless element to give importance just to hands.

The mould should be washed between the construction of one brick and another.

Without this passage bricks can’t be compact and the work is useless.

Women divide their time between family and work, while men just work on bricks. Women take care of children, food and household tasks.

Children, careful observers, learn to work from adults. As if they were in a game, the gestures of adults are naively repeated without knowing that one day they will grant them a job.

The oven. The portrait of this “adult”. Nine mouths, fifteen lines, a monster made of mud that will soon swallow about 4, or maybe 5, trees.

The oven is ready, before starting baking men enjoy one of the few joys of the day: a cigarette. This picture was chosen by Monica Allende, Canon Professional Network. editor choice.

Deforestation for the construction of bricks is one of the country's problems, but in the name of “progress” some damages, unluckily, are accepted.

The baking expert’s task is the more delicate: he’s not part of the family, but paid by it not to make the entire work vain. Mitanga’s future depends on baking. This picture was chosen by Monica Allende, Canon Professional Network. editor choice.

Every single mouth should have the same temperature all night long. It’s a hell of a job in which men are the most important players.

In the heart of the night men keep up the heat of the oven continuing to cut and put firewood in any single mouth.