BRICKS AND CEMENT DON’T MAKE A HOUSE
2024, Multimedia installation, video loop, sound, textile, steel, 22:59 min, Variable dimensions
Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger
Teaser: https://vimeo.com/1013888424
Voices: Vanessa Amoah Opoku,
Tape cassette recording by Kwabena Krah
Exhibition views: Roxana Rios
In the mid-1990s, Vanessa Amoah Opoku's grandfather sent his son a worried voice message on tape cassette: the money meant to support the family in Ghana hadn't arrived. For him, it was clear: everyone who emigrates builds a house at home. A house for the family, and a house to return to.
This installation explores how bridges to home are maintained across diaspora, and how to build belonging when land itself has been expropriated by neo-colonial structures. Using smartphone LiDAR scanning, a tool historically used for territorial mapping and resource extraction, fragments of unfinished houses are captured across Ghana. These point clouds become self-portraits: tangible representations of space mapped through touch rather than extractive seeing.
Joy Weinberger transforms these digital fragments into woven textiles, where pixels become materialized through warp and weft. Family archive photographs move from analog to digital to textile, creating mediators between virtual and physical worlds. A second textile work assembles scanned fragments from multiple unfinished houses into one communal home. Each fragment standing for a similar story of interrupted construction and deferred dreams.
Twenty steel reinforcement bars arrange according to the grandfather's house floor plan. This steel, left protruding from concrete structures across Ghana as preparation for future building phases when resources allow, embodies both modernization and financial limitation. The installation's center features textile work based on point cloud scans of village ground, positioned where the courtyard of a traditional Ashanti house would be. A space for gathering and nourishment.
This collaboration resists categorizations that restrict both technology and textile work, questioning their gender-specific and geographical connotations. By bringing digital worlds back into physical, tactile space, it is explored how cultural knowledge transforms across generations, migration, and diaspora. Not through appropriation, but through lived inheritance and technological resistance.