Amado Alfadni was raised in downtown Cairo on two homelands at once, Sudan in the stories told over milky tea on Friday mornings and Egypt in the street outside the door, and he has spent his life working in the distance between them, Nubian by inheritance, Cairene by life, and at home in neither. That distance is his subject. Where official histories rendered Blackness as someone else's invention, a thing to be pitied, feared, or filed away, he goes back into the colonial archive and brings out the people who were written over, the slave-soldiers gifted to foreign armies and the faces catalogued as propaganda, and from them he builds his own record in the Black Ivory Project and the Alternative Museum of the Sudan, not to mourn a past but to change who is allowed to author an image and whose face is permitted to mean something. I photographed him where the work comes from, the downtown apartment that is studio, gallery and archive at once, where nothing was arranged for the camera and the masks, the old photographs, the shelves bowed with research and the canvas still wet against the wall are not a backdrop to the man but the man himself, assembled over years into a self-portrait you can walk through. What I was after was not a likeness but a way of seeing: Amado meets the lens the way he meets the archive, levelly and without apology, then turns back to the work, brush in hand, and carries on, and the pictures try to hold the maker and the history he refuses to let disappear at the same time.
"My practice as a painter has afforded me a space to recreate an identity where my Nubian heritage meets my Cairene present." Amado Alfadni
