Títle: El mensaje del Kanga
Year: 2011-2012
Length: 10´11”

Project and realization: Marisa González
Translations from swahili: Justo Lacunza Balda, Africanist and Arabist
Rector of the Instituto Pontificio de Estudios Arabes e Islámicos

Summary
A succession 18 photographs with messages in swahili and their translations in a  projection of consecutive stills that show us women in different situations wearing their colorfull dresses and veils

Kanga is the language of thousands of East African women.

These East African women use their colorful dresses «kangas» as a media of communicating and transmitting messages. These written messages in Swahili are a way of social communication, visual and silent expressions of their feelings, beliefs and traditions. Sometimes they are proverbs, and sometimes phrases from sacred books such as the Bible or the Koran. In many cases they are used as a means of political propaganda or as signs of identity or affinity to a certain ideology or political party. The kanga, in addition to its use as functional clothing, contains decorative motifs that add additional codes of expression to the inscriptions. They are the voice of thousands of women from various countries on the African continent whose culture, history and tradition are expressed in the Swahili language.