Ella-Marit Wijnhoud



GRADUATION 
  1. As Was Promised Before - Mining in Mozambique

PROJECTS
  1. ATÉ JÁ
  2. (EXPO) Cohesive Echoes
  3. Exploring the intersection
  4. Postcolonial Echoes
  5. Is the Universe a Giant Loop?
  6. GROEN
  7. PROP
  8. Reflection

INTERNSHIP
  1. ZOKU

FIELD NOTES
  1. Typo & Posters
  2. Other things


Email
About me
@ellamaritw






As Was Promised Before - Mining in MozambiqueJun 2026 
 




A Mozambican mother, coming from a family who worked the land in the south for generations. A Dutch father who researched the same kind of land as a development question rather than a daily one. My sister and I grew up moving between countries and continents, between different ways of knowing and relating to land: living on it, and writing about it. That contrast is the foundation of this work.

As Was Promised Before is a publication I made in response to my sister’s research on mining in Mozambique. In the province where our mother is from, and in other parts of the country. In each place, land is expropriated for the extraction of minerals: titanium, zirconium, ilmenite, gold. The communities living there are promised better houses, good jobs, and better lives overall, in return for what they give up.

In practice, the promises break. What remains is a landscape transformed and households left to absorb the cost. Where my father once worked on agricultural development, the same ground is now being extracted for minerals. The minerals taken from that soil end up in paint, in glass, in the screens we look at every day.

This publication brings together my sister’s photography and the testimonies she gathered, to ask what happens when land shifts from a way of life to a raw material. Around this central story, the book moves through other landscapes of extraction in Mozambique. Quieter, smaller, drawing out gold by hand. As Was Promised Before raises questions about what belongs to whom, about the value of promises tied to development and prosperity, and about what a promise is worth when the ground it was made on n longer exists.

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Concept & Design: Ella-Marit Wijnhoud
Photography & Research: Leianne Wijnhoud
Testimonies: Residents of the mining areas in Mozambique





©2026
Ella-Marit Wijnhoud
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