Wuh.ey - “Mtu wa Bahari”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Mtu wa Bahari”

Beneath a bridge, on the edge of town, stands a figure—anonymous, veiled, dignified. The body wears a simple robe, its feet rest on wet asphalt, and a heavy orange buoy pulls on a rope. In the background, dozens of posters read: "Wuh.ey." An echo of its own presence.

"Mtu wa Bahari" – the man of the sea – appears like a being between worlds. He stands where the water touches civilization. His masked figure eludes view; it rejects identity, attribution, and consumption. The sea is both origin and boundary – and the buoy a symbol of stability, of orientation in times of current.

Here, the mythical merges with the documentary. The place seems real, but the scene is too charged, too precise, to be merely a depiction. It is a hallucinated present—a place where memory, resistance, and self-assertion materialize.

Wuh.ey demonstrates how spirituality can be hidden in everyday images. The masked person becomes a metaphor for Black identity in a globalized world—simultaneously visible and invisible, sustained by history and the sea.

"Mtu wa Bahari" is a silent, poetic rebellion against forgetting. A ritual of self-location in a world that is constantly being remapped.