Fowota Mortoo is a cultural geographer, writer, and visual artist. Her essays and visual works can be found in The Funambulist, Disegno Journal, and you are here: the journal of creative geography. Earlier this year, she was selected for a month-long curatorial and research residency program with Raw Material Company and in 2024, she was selected by The World Around as one of 25 under 25 Young Climate Prize awardees globally for her photography and Eʋe language project Mapping Keta.

Her work engages with the early post-independence period in West Africa, and considers how our work in the present can take up the unfinished work of emancipation by creating cultural spaces that inspire different possibilities for how we conceive of our collective histories and relation with the natural world. Within the discipline of geography, she situates her creative and academic work in relation to Black Geographies, a framework that examines how we might engage with Black spatial and ecological practices on their own terms. Her interest in the encounter of architecture and Black Geographies has animated her current project centered on the proposed redesign of a library that was formerly a colonial courthouse in the coastal town of Keta in southeastern Ghana. It has also informed her work as a former fellow with the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge where she co-designed an educational space in Aburi, Ghana centered around sustaining culturally significant indigenous seeds and plants of the region. Integrating archival research, library visits, and oral histories collected with land stewards, seedkeepers, and botanists, this project is detailed in a commissioned essay she wrote for Disegno Journal’s 2024 themed issue on design and memory.

Earlier this year, based on research she conducted on the history of Black bricklaying and stonemasonry traditions in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina area, she created and exhibited a 12 square foot map composed of layered archival photographs overlaid with a hand drawn maze at the invitation of the Chapel Hill Historical Society and in collaboration with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center. 

She is currently a graduate student in geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation.

Image Credit: Massow Ka