Cartographies of Labor
SUDAISU OSMAN
Visual Art
Originally Published: 10 July 2026
Cartographies of Labor examines informal gold mining (galamsey) as a spatial and material condition. The work combines topographic mapping with portraiture to position the miner within systems of extraction. Each image references a specific site through contour lines, access routes, and excavation zones. These elements function as records of intervention rather than neutral descriptions of land.
The project focuses on the relationship between labour, environmental degradation, and subsurface economies. The mining site appears as a fragmented system shaped by risk, urgency, and survival. By working across multiple locations, the series constructs a dispersed geography of extraction rather than a single narrative.
The images are not documentary. They are constructed surfaces where the landscape is read through traces of pressure, removal, and alteration. The work treats mapping as a method of exposing hidden processes and locating the human body within them.
The Creative
SUDAISU OSMAN
Sudaisu Osman is a Ghanaian artist and student working across installation, drawing, and mixed media. His practice examines extraction, material decay, and the politics of memory. He focuses on informal mining landscapes and the conditions of labor that shape them. Using mapping, surface intervention, and image construction, he treats the landscape as a record of use and depletion. His work investigates how histories are embedded in material processes and how they fragment, persist, or disappear within postcolonial economies.