Biography

Wana Udobang is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller whose work spans writing, poetry,performance, curation and installation art. She has released three spoken word albums and performed across Africa, Europe and the US with commissions from the Edinburgh International Festival, Deutsches Museum and The Gates Foundation. As a journalist, she has worked with the Guardian, CNN, BBC and Aljazeera and curated exhibitions exploring food, memory, identity and the body. She runs Comfort Food storytelling workshop which uses food memories to inspire new stories. Wana is the creator of the multimedia exhibition, Dirty Laundry and the Spoken word concert Souled Out. She guest lectures and facilitates workshops on storytelling, writing and creativity. She was an Ama Ata Aidoo Fellow at Northwestern University in 2022.

Project

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Wana will be developing her memoir. This memoir is a personal account of a woman spending her life trying to control her body, uncovering the privileges that society extends when you start to fit into its gaze, the highs, lows, the dysmorphia, the dissociation and discovering if there is truly space for a truce with our bodies nestled within a society that arbitrates its value and rewards. This book is a bold take on navigating life without the right kind of body and the things that happen when your body is becoming socially acceptable.

Through coming-of-age memories of childhood, family, love, friendship, assault, and joy, this memoir shows the confrontational and casual ways that a fat body experiences the world, its violence and rejection, the price it must pay for belonging and ultimately what it means to find freedom inside one’s own skin, if that freedom truly exists. Through its intimate, honest, vulnerable storytelling and poetic sensibilities, this book considers big questions on the construction, consumption, currency and commoditisation of the body, of beauty, of desire.