Digging into the Roots: Art, Lineage, and Truth in Conversation with Kaloki Nyamai

How do you identify something as a story to tell?

When i went to Europe for the first time it was quite interesting to notice some similarities with the ground that I was coming from. I wasn’t interested on differences, but it’s natural, distance, changes… But when I noticed similarities I started investigating how is it possible that we live in different spaces around the world, but there’s a little bit of similarities.

And during that period of time I was actually investigating about identity, the “who am I?”

So when I came back is when I went and started having research and sitting down with my grandmother, sitting down with my mother, sitting down with old people just asking them about the past.

So not only their history, but also the history of the spaces. And these spaces affected other people. And the more you dig, the more you realize that it affected the larger scale of people.

So I realised it’s like a tree. There are some roots and connection. So the more you dig down to, the more you go down from a branch to a root. So to the source human.

Yeah, but it’s the source is so far away.

What do you think the source is?

The only thing I could get is stories. Some sounded like mythical stories, but other sound is like reality. And other sounded that unbelievable things. So all these mixed together, it’s just an idea of the source. But actually not the tangible thing of the source.

Why do you connect with this topic?

I can drop my lineage because it’s something that I’m familiar with and it’s something that my family have gone through. I can only talk about the something that relates to me. Which surprisingly over the years I’ve come to realize that it also relates to many other people. So my voice becomes the voice of many, you know, which is quite interesting and beautiful.

I cannot tell a story of someone else story. That’s the reason why our culture has been wiped out in a sense of it’s just been wounded after wound after wound after wound after wound after wound until we’re trying to recognize who we are. So I tell my own story.

Given that you are digging in your lineage to through people understand stories and spaces and ultimately human source. What is your relation with history?

I loved history. It was one of my subjects that I took into the heart. But it’s also funny. When you look at history as it is written, our history starts after colonization. Like we have this thing, a mountain in Kenya, it’s called Mount Kenya, which was discovered by a white man. So you can imagine that’s funny. I’m also discovered by a white man from Kenya. So, so it’s these histories that were written biased to enforce an idea or an ideology of a certain space. There are many parts of history that have been deluted. Like concetration camps in Germany, we had concentration camps also, but it’s something that’s been reduced because concentration camps are supposed to be only in Germany. Like the Tulsa massacre in the States. People talk about the Tulsa massacre, but actually these massacres were everywhere.

So to investigate you had to go to the back of the book for you to find out all this information. But I did not want to go deep into the familiar stories and familiar investigations of reality. I just wanted to know who I am.

So that’s why I started digging through my grandmother, asking them about their grandmother, just to find out how life was before anything ever existed, how much they knew and the beauty of that.

Do you think there is space in the world for everyone’s truth?

You know the role of the truth, right? The truth should never come out because if the truth come out, then it affects the wild economy.

In any case, there’s always pride of knowing yourself. Someone who loses their culture, for me, I always say, is someone who loses themselves.

Then they will try to capture what is around them and start to believe “oh, this is my culture”, “Oh, this is who I am”.

I see art as a way to remind us the truth, the culture, the stories that are actually behind of the present show, do you agree? It’s funny because sometimes art is perceived as the show itself, as the pretty thing that you put on the wall with colors. What do you think of the controversy between art disguising as pretty, or art as an actor of truth or reminder of ourselves?

I still believe, art still does that, even though people use it in different forms. There are artists who create pieces for beauty. But actually even recreation of beauty during a period of time, becomes a historical archival to commemorate or to capture that moment. And there’s a reason why this is happening during a certain period of time. At the same time, there are artist who are fighting for something. And those are different artists from this one who are appreciating beauty of a period of time. And there are other artists who will be called the artists of war, they side on one side of a conflict and they do documentary. We still need all of them because it’s different voices of a certain time. Conceptual artists question stupidity, as question smartness and question wealth and question use of money and question power.

But we all as artists have a purpose. And each artist has their own purpose on what they need to do. And connecting this back to the past of my village, every man in the community had a purpose. There were men who were selected to be warriors, others doctors, musicians, painters,… Everyone had a purpose in what they did.

Do you think everyone in society, besides artists, have a purpose?

Everyone has a purpose. There is someone whose purpose is to support an artist and they don’t know how they do it, but they find themselves doing it. And then there are others who use an artist as a weapon. There are others whose work is make sure that the world is green and there’s food for everybody. They don’t know how they do it, but in one way or another, they do it. And there are people whose work is to destroy it. And they know how they do it. Hm..

I don’ t believe in Karma anymore. We have this thing where we stress ourselves on believing that because people did bad things, bad things will happen to them. It doesn’t work like that. Life is unfair and it’s always going to be that way. It’s just that everyone in this world has a purpose. Some of their purpose is to be evil, some of their purpose is to be good. It’s just about aligning ourselves with the right people. That’s what I believe in.

What could you say about the power of beliefs?

When it comes now to believe in something, this is it’s a different it’s a different composition. It’s a different conversation. When you believe that you’re sick. You get sick.

I believe for example that the body itself has the power of healing itself. Abelief system is so powerful Yeah. When you put your mind into something anything can happen.

I like the idea that beliefs could create realities in a way.

Yeah. And for me, stories also create beliefs, so it’s all connected, you know?

So actually, the stories we write can create realities?

Well that’s why the British became the very center of everything. One of the most successful things that they ever done, one of the smartest moves: writing books.

They created a truth, their own. A truth that most of us were forced to believe in. And that is how the world was changed to be the way it is. The world was changed through the books that were written and documentations that were taken.

Do you think digital content and short videos that are created to evoque emotions particularly in geopolitical conflicts but also for commercial reasons, are the new support to mold truth?

Videos actually cover moments. For example the seggregation happening in Kenya was captured in videos for people to believe it.

I think images also cover moments. The images of my work are frozen moments of a certain period of time. Whether it was joyful or not or whether it was like this or not but actually this moment existed whether it was filmed or not, during that period of time.

Do you have any aspiration?

I wish one day in the future to write a book. But my book will be in my own perspective. I think we all need to write books because we need to change the narrative.

If everyone writes books in everyone’s perspective, then what is “the” narrative?

When I was digging into history, I also went to ask different old men besides my family, about the history, there was a point where the conversation was similar. I told you, it’s a tree. You’re not so far away from the truth. So if all of us can investigate our past, we have beauty of knowing our culture, knowing our history. Our history is not white man’s perspective, but our history on our perspective. Our history, my grandmother’s perspective, now history of my great-grandmother’s perspective. And these are the histories that we need to talk about.

Coming from a familiarity with matriarchy, what do you think of feminism?

Feminism is an agenda for some people, which when you look at, I’ve just told you about the culture about fighting for rights of women. Everyone wants women’s right. But the way feminism came in, women accepted it because it was like for rights. And only when they were in the boat, they realized, oh my God, this is actually an agenda. It is not what we were planning to, but we’ve been driven to something else that we have no idea where. And it seems that it’s crushing because when that happens, when it becomes a fight between a man and a woman, the society and the world as we know changes. And that’s why now we don’t talk about feminism movement, and it has been adjurned with LGBTQ that is a movement by itself. But still, some people in the movement are fighting men. Others are not. And anger drives the ball.

Title: Digging into the Roots: Art, Lineage, and Truth in Conversation with Kaloki Nyamai

Type: Interview / Philosophical Reflection

Description:

An intimate and expansive conversation with an artist and thinker exploring the role of lineage, storytelling, history, and art as a form of ancestral and political truth. The interview touches on the idea of "the source," the manipulation of history, the emotional fracture of cultural displacement, and how stories—and books—shape reality. A deeply personal and philosophical dialogue on memory, belief, and the purpose of art in a fractured world.