The boundaries between traditions, absence, memories and the present

On the 31st of October I coordinated a digital collage workshop at Europeana as a way to wrap up Black History Month. We invited artist Lela Harris to share some simple digital collaging techniques using a Black heritage gallery I put together as a resource.
Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at creating some digital collages and made this piece with my brothers as subjects. In the background you have a Ghanaian Kente cloth similar to the one I remember hanging on a wall in my family home in Senegal. An Aku Mma doll is scattered around behind them representing our mothers desire for children and her desire for grandchildren too.
This piece is actually about my mother and I but we are both physically absent as subjects.
I'm hiding from the topic as well as trying to address how my brothers have not had to worry about the constant reminders of the need and importance to bear children.
The pressures of being a woman and coming from a matriarchal family creates a clash between the two cultures that gave birth to me. Not only did I grow up in different countries than my mother, with different education systems, I grew up in a different time that has allowed me more freedom than she had. I don't have an answer to her questions about children (I'm unsure that I wan't them) and I don't blame her for worrying about that as she gets older.
My mother is repeating what has been taught to her by her own mother and even then her desires are very very real outside of this repetition. She tells me, I am the one who needs to continue her mothers lineage as none of her sisters have daughters.
My grandmother who I only knew by the name Antisisi (Auntie Cecilia), was known to be a great medicine woman who everyone went to because she knew what herbs and plants healed different ailments. To this day, my mother makes me drink 'Antisisi's medicine' that she boils into a bitter tea any time I am back in the Netherlands.
During her life, my grandmother was able to acquired two big plots of land around Takoradi for her 8 children. One for her four sons and one for her four daughters to make sure that no matter what happened in life, they could build a home for themselves.
Antisisi was married to a musician called Kweku Atta who wrote lyrics and played the trumpet in a highlife band.

This next collage is dedicated to her and the grandfather I never met. She is set four times in front of a Kente cloth similar to the one she wears over her clothes. My grandfather is represented by the humming bird feeding on the trumpet flower in her hand. Humming birds can symbolise messengers from the spirit world. They also represent joy, love, freedom and creativity.
This humming bird also weaves a thread into my childhood in Senegal. I remember watching sunbirds (the African humming bird) feed on the flowers in our garden. I might have never had the opportunity to meet my grandfather, but in a way, today I see him as the sunbirds that came to 'play' on the trumpets in our garden.
A few years ago my mother shared with me the name of the band my grandfather played in and wrote lyrics for. It is only fitting I end this piece with his music.