Nana Danso
The Witnesses

Tallulah: I am so excited to speak to someone in Ghana. How is everything there?

Nana: It has been raining heavily, and the flooding has affected people in ways that feel unpredictable. It reminds you how quickly everyday life can be disrupted.

Nana: I left university because the work I was already making felt more connected to my actual interests. I was around nineteen or twenty and increasingly drawn to art.

Tallulah: So the practice emerged before there was an institution around it.

Nana: I became interested in what my family practised culturally and spiritually—what they considered sacred and how they understood the invisible world.

Nana: Shrines, statues, symbols and monuments are all ways of relating to forces that are not physically present but still guide daily life.

Nana: I developed characters called The Witnesses. They are non-binary beings from an imagined world, but they carry philosophies from Ghanaian folklore and sacred cultural practices.

Tallulah: They allow old spiritual languages to enter a contemporary visual world without becoming replicas of the past.

Nana: There are not enough places to encounter art publicly. Public art is often understood as a monument to a political or historical figure.

Nana: I began placing The Witnesses in the street and through murals, creating another kind of public presence.

Nana: The gallery system can become concentrated around a few successful artists and then pursue other artists who resemble them.

Nana: Artists who are building worlds or working across several forms may not fit easily into that structure.

Nana: Residencies allow me to create an environment and let people experience the world, rather than only seeing one object.

Tallulah: That suggests the work needs space, duration and context—not merely representation on a wall.

Nana: The collaboration with Off-White was one significant moment because the visual language entered another field.

Tallulah: It shows that the characters can move into fashion while remaining part of a larger mythology.

Tallulah: Have you considered bringing your writing, mythology, images and cultural context together in a book?

Nana: I write a lot, but I had not yet thought about it in such a cohesive way. It feels like a direction that makes sense.

Nana: I want to see where this language belongs in the art world and in institutions outside Ghana, without simply following whatever trend is moving.

Tallulah: The task is to build the network and context around the work without changing its centre.