Sandra Martins

Nzinga Threads takes its name from Queen Nzinga, whose resistance to Portuguese colonial expansion offered me a different point of connection with African history.

Growing up in Portugal, much of the history available to me positioned Blackness through slavery, colonisation and subjugation. Discovering an African woman as a figure of authority, resistance and self-determination offered another way of understanding what could be inherited from the past.

Nzinga became an imaginative thread rather than a claim to lineage: a connection to strength, resistance and the possibility of defining oneself beyond identities imposed by others.

Threads carries both a tangible and conceptual meaning. It appears through making, but also in the connections running through the practice: between personal experience and collective history, vulnerability and resistance, ancestry and the present, the individual and the structures around them.

Together, Nzinga Threads names a practice concerned not only with what we inherit, but with what we choose to carry forward, question, reconstruct and transform.

The roots of this practice extend back more than two decades. A 2004 newspaper feature on Sandra's early photographic work described her exploration of loneliness and the desire to belong. What began through photography has since expanded into a multidisciplinary practice, with concepts finding expression through different materials, processes and forms.