Sanne De Wilde

For the tenth edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival, Sanne De Wilde takes part in the group exhibition ‘Family Stories’ at Hangar. In this conversation, the photographer looks back on her nomadic life, her cautious relationship with books and publications, and the ways in which personal experiences shape her work. She speaks about intimacy and family, but also about migration, motherhood, neocolonial structures, and the responsibility of the artist. From Lagos to Antwerp, a practice unfolds in which photography functions as a form of research, and moments of presentation are meant to enable immersive experience. Sanne De Wilde emerges as an artist engaged in a persistent search for new ways of seeing, connecting, and imagining.

ER: (Els Roeandt) This month marks the opening of the tenth edition of PhotoBrussels. It is a relatively low-profile event that unfolds mainly across Brussels galleries dedicated to photography. You are taking part in the group exhibition ‘Family Stories’ at Hangar. Intimacy and family relationships play an important role in your new oeuvre. Given how much you travelled early in life, I wonder: have you built up a library at home or in your studio?

SDW: (Sanne De Wilde) Not really. Nowhere anymore. Because I moved almost every year while living in Amsterdam and was constantly on the move — I also spent long periods in Nigeria — I stopped buying books about ten years ago. One of the very first titles I ever bought, and one that has stayed with me all this time, is a fluorescent pink book by Benjamin Verdonck, Werk/Some Work, published by Afreux and MER in 2017.

ER: That sounds familiar. Didn’t it have a bright pink accent on the cover?

SDW: Yes, exactly. I feel very drawn to that colour, to its intensity. But for years my books lived in boxes; I didn’t have a fixed place to live. In fact, I still don’t really have a studio of my own. As long as I was travelling so much, building up a library felt almost pointless. Now, at home in Antwerp, we are working on a large bookcase along the wall. For the moment, I only have a single ‘floating’ shelf where I place my current reading. It feels as if the books are hovering.

Sometimes I also keep books for artist friends who are moving, so their libraries can remain nomadic and continue to travel and grow. For a while, we were quite literally keeping each other’s books suspended in the air. From that nomadic collection, I vividly remember a beautiful publication by Lorenzo Vitturi, Money Must Be Made, about the Balogun Market in Lagos. The market is the point of departure, but so is an abandoned bank building filled with dusty objects. The book explores atypical patterns of urban change through two contrasting realities in Lagos: the Financial Trust House building and the Balogun Street Market. It is a colourful book, with collages, photographs, and still lifes made from found materials. I was in Lagos when Vitturi was working on it and witnessed the making process up close. Money Must Be Made is not only a photographic project, but also sculptural and installation oriented. Each copy had a different cover, assembled from materials sourced from the market itself.

ER: Sacks was known for his holistic approach, yet on the island he seems to look at things differently. From a postcolonial perspective, you are clearly attentive to that.

SDW: Absolutely. Early on, it was often said that I was ‘seeing through the eyes’ of people with achromatopsia, but that is of course impossible. These are always my images, my interpretation. I gather images to construct a story; I do not claim that I can fully represent a culture or someone else’s experience.

ER: I found it powerful that, in your book, achromatopsia is not presented as an illness, but rather as something they have and we do not.

SDW: I often work with people who are seen as ‘different’, and photography is a medium that, as I mentioned earlier, has historically played a major role in reinforcing that classificatory gaze. My central question is always this: can you still empower people using such a loaded medium? That is what I try to do, even though it can also go wrong. My work aims to bring about a shift in perception, to hold up a mirror.

The Island of the Colorblind, for instance, is about how absurd it is that the world is organised around the gaze of a particular group, politically, economically, but also quite literally in visual terms. Think of traffic lights that rely on colours many people cannot distinguish. After finishing this project my work was often compared to that of the Irish photographer Richard Mosse, even though I did not yet know his practice at the time. At school, we were mainly presented with white male figures, with little attention paid to contemporary practice. Only much later did I encounter Mosse’s thermal camera projects. I tried working with such a camera myself, but they are considered military equipment. Mosse had access to those kinds of tools, as well as to other forms of infrastructure.

Years later, I attended one of his talks. I wanted to finally see his work for myself. He was criticised for aestheticizing suffering, a risk that always lurks in projects of this kind. Achromatopsia is also a limitation: people who have it cannot, for instance, drive a car, which affects work, freedom, and mobility. In my project, however, the focus shifts to the philosophical layer: how can this way of seeing be framed as something empowering? How can we embrace the diversity of perception, rather than holding on to a conditioned, mainstream gaze?

That is what I am trying to explore with this work: can we rethink our standards, our own ‘conditions’? Many of them do not apply to everyone and do not always reflect the richness of reality. Scientifically speaking, it cannot be proven that you see pink in the same way I see pink. Nor can we precisely determine how someone with achromatopsia experiences the world, because that experience is not reversible. For me, that not-knowing becomes a powerful metaphor, much like in the twins project, where science still cannot explain why so many twins are born in that region. This open field leaves room for imagination and mysticism, rather than the Western desire for final answers.

ER: Is ‘Family Stories’ at Hangar an important moment for you?

SDW: Absolutely. My work has never really been visible in Belgium. People I grew up with have rarely been able to see it in an exhibition context. What I deeply miss, and what I consciously try to make space for, is time and a physical workspace to develop an exhibition. A large part of my practice consists of translating images into a spatial experience, ideally interactive and immersive. For me, photography is the research; the space is where the work takes shape and where people can experience it, not just understand it.

ER: A book is, by definition, one-dimensional. Do you experience that as a limitation?

SDW: No. The cover of The Island of the Colorblind, for example, was UV-sensitive, as a reference to light sensitivity in achromatopsia. The book itself is therefore also sensitive to light: when you hold it in the sun, the image of the island appears beneath the cover. Even in book form, I always try to create an interaction that is logical and motivated by the content.

ER: You were originally trained as a painter, right?

SDW: My background actually lies elsewhere, in theatre: improvisation, creating images through movement and sound. I was never interested in text-based theatre or in repetition. When I first saw a performance by FC Bergman, I immediately knew: this is what I had been looking for. A form of theatre that does not revolve around text, but around experience and images that linger. In that sense, theatre remains a greater source of inspiration for me than the visual arts, even though I work primarily with photography. Photography is my language, but not necessarily my inspiration.

ER: So for you, photography is a method of research.

SDW: Yes, it’s not my final form.

ER: The perfect photograph is not the end in itself?

SDW: No. What interests me most is the development of form, the transformation. My work is about connection, which is also why I value photography as a democratic and accessible medium. In my new project, I try to consciously mobilise my white privilege. I have access to spaces that others do not. People often recognise themselves in me, which sometimes makes me a gateway to stories that would otherwise be reduced to labels like ‘the migrant’ or ‘the refugee’. My responsibility lies in helping to open up that gaze.

ER: How difficult is it for you to let go of the white saviour role?

SDW: I don’t know whether you can ever fully shed it.

ER: Taking a broader view, do you see this evolving over the past decade?

SDW: Certainly, but in recent years the discourse has swung strongly to one side — understandably so, given how extremely skewed it was to begin with. Many white photographers who worked for years without consent and made a lot of money from it now feel completely written off. At the same time, I see that makers of colour, or makers with a migration background, still receive fewer resources. The diversity that is visible today often remains superficial, at face value. Institutions hire people of colour, but most of the time these are people who were born here, not people who genuinely come from another culture, with different ideas about time, structure, and context. True inclusion requires space and appreciation for those kinds of fundamental differences, and we are still a long way from that.

Discrimination and racism are present everywhere — including within ourselves. I cannot pretend to stand outside of that. My father was born in Congo; that fact feeds into my personal search and into my work. I try not to step into a white saviour role, but rather to take responsibility. Just yesterday, for instance, I was attending a panel discussion at IDFA Doclab with Khalil Ashawi, the journalist and new media producer behind the VR experience Under the same sky. He said: ‘Action means bringing someone here. Making sure that person can live safely.’ That stayed with me, because it rings true: that is what makes a structural difference in the long term.

I am also in the midst of such a process myself. For me, it felt almost self-evident that I should share my privilege with someone, without that person owing me anything in return. As difficult as it is, I have been able to do that in concrete terms — with at least one person, my partner. Not just returning to the place where you took photographs, book in hand, to show the work. Those are steps, but they can remain fragile. I dream, for instance, of making a film so that the families of the people I work with can come here for the premiere and then decide for themselves: to stay or to return. 

I have long been searching for ways to allow people to become part of this world not only through their stories, but also through their physical presence. With my partner, we have already come a long way, but I know how heavy that process is. It has demanded a great deal from me, yet I do not want to give up. I see many couples collapse under these procedures, and that is understandable: the migration system is designed to prevent you from succeeding. Much like colonial systems, which are built to operate efficiently and with purpose. All systems of oppression — against women, against people of colour — share mechanisms that have been functioning for centuries and continue to resurface with unexpected force.