Dabanga dos Santos – The enchanted workshop

Ask her if her pieces are ritualistic and the answer will come promptly: “I am from the Universe and everything is energy.”

At number 188 on Rua João de Barros, in Maputo, there is an enchanted place where stones, metals and pieces of wood merge with natural light and the soul of an alchemist artisan to take on a new life, in the form of a necklace, bracelet or earring – a workshop as magical and full of stories as its creator: Dabanga dos Santos

Don’t ask where they came from: today it may be from Nampula, tomorrow from Quelimane. Dabanga rejects this need that the world has to sort people into boxes. “If I tell you where I’m from, they’ll put a label on it soon,” he complains with discontent. Don’t even ask her to tell you her memories of the armed struggle in Tanzania, where she met her Mozambican husband. “Creativity may come from the past, but the energy is from today,” she proclaims in an enigmatic way.

She may speak of her birth name, which migrated from the Central Plateau of Angola to the Indian Ocean and then traveled to the Americas, along the way gaining colours, shapes and intonations that mix in a melodious tone from everywhere and nowhere.

Ask her, however, about the pieces and you will find that in each there is a narrative. “All of my pieces have a history and it’s a history of Africa. Each one interprets them in their own way. I only provide the ingredients,” she explains while removing the beads from an earring that decorates a wooden mask.

And if they talk about Africa, they also necessarily talk about Mozambique. Dabanga’s creativity awoke in times of crisis, at a time when everything was missing. It was the 1980s and the material she found to shape the inspiration that blew in her ear came from used Javel bottles. The white plastic was cut out in geometric shapes borrowed from Mary Quant’s drawings and painted with varnish (“one of the few things we could still get”) to create earrings. Those were the times of socialism and you couldn’t sell things, so you offered it to your friends in exchange for more used bottles of bleach. From plastic she went to metal with the help of a brother-in-law who was a mechanic and prepared a plate for her to mold the pieces. Later on, the metal was joined by cow horn and then wood, stones and shells, among other local materials.

“My brand is not for people who follow fashion. It’s for confident people who have their own style.”

Exploring the small garage transformed into a studio, you can find a tree of life embedded in a wooden pendant or a bird feather accompanied by a conch. You will never find two identical pieces, not even in a pair of earrings. “My brand is not for people who follow fashion; it is for confident people who have their own style,” she acknowledges. In many of them you will see the spiral that represents the circle of life. After all, as the creative says, “life always ends where it begins – when we die, we return to earth and become manure for other forms of life,” accidentally denouncing her past as a biologist teaching at the Faculty of Medicine of the Eduardo Mondlane University. “Jewelery was my ticket to do what I like,” she explains.

Ask her if her pieces are ritualistic and the answer will come promptly: “I am from the Universe and everything is energy.”

Issue 65 Jan/Feb | Download