The MEAM Logo : an Artist-Researcher Collaboration

”How about a logo”, one of us said. ”A logo for the MEAM Network”. Off course we wanted a logo, MEAM Network founders agreed, but what should it be? Soon it became clear that this could be an opportunity for an artist-researcher collaboration, and my thoughts
immediately wandered to Ann Gollifer. Ann and I collaborated in a project in Botswana 2016, portraying the findings of my PhD thesis on women’s cattle ownership in the Kalahari, and she had attended the MEAM workshop in May 2023.

Ann Gollifer, a world-renowned artist

Ann is a visual artist, working with printmaking, photography, paint and words as well as an articulated conceptual process grounded in material practice. You can see her work on her website www.anngollifer.org. Represented by the Guns and Rain Gallery in Johannesburg, running the Art residency centre Gaborone in Botswana and showing a piece at the British Museum, she still enthusiastically took the time to explore a MEAM logo collaboration. Just as she had taken the time to work together with me in her studio in 2016 when I came back to Botswana, where I previously had conducted nine-month ethnographic field work, to give talks and hand out my dissertation book at universities, government ministries and village Kgotlas, farms and cattle posts.

"My cow" project

We spent two weeks driving around the country to different universities, to national as well as local ministries of agriculture and gendered affairs and we visited humans and cattle all around Ghanzi District. I talked and laughed and hugged with my previous interlocuters and Ann join in the conversations, took photographs, notes and made drawings. Back in her studio Ann taught me the first basic principles of photo transfer and print making. The project that we called “ ‘My cow’, she said” , highlighting ownership, species, gender and verbal claim, resulted in a series of postcards that we made together, taking turns to draw and colour. Sending these postcards all around would underline, the idea was, that women do own cattle in Botswana.

Working with Ann, who would ask different questions to my research results and collected data than I would, as her gaze was grounded in the material artistic practice. I was amazed at the new links, overlaps and gaps that saw, approaching my otherwise, by then, very familiar book with an artistic intention. When I started my postdoc project on human-horse-cow relations in the American West, I invited Ann to come art with me at the conceptualisation phase, rather than at the dissemination phase, and the way that she taught me to draw one line and then shade has had a paramount impact on my data collection and analysis since then.

Maybe a round, crescent or spiral outer shape...

When I recently asked Ann about her possibility and interest in making a MEAM logo, she wrote me “Yeah! Why not…. Send some conceptual text ideas” and I answered, after having checked in with Véronique and the Team “Fabulous! We are thinking multispecies and more-than-human, animal, plant, mineral, water. Maybe a round, crescent or spiral outer shape…” And off it went. After sending four different versions of the same theme around to the MEAM Team we settled for the one you now see all over this website. As researchers are (in theory at least and often in practice) paid for their time and artists are (in theory at least and often in practice) paid for their product, our MEAM initiative paid Ann for her work. This is one way that artist-researcher collaborations can happen, and I look forward to hearing about other ways from all you multispecies ethnographers using artistic methods out there.

Andrea Petitt