Feeling as wealth

Glen Norah, in Harare, was built in the 1960s for the city’s tobacco-factory workers. It is the township where my grandmother bought her first home at 21: a two-roomed cottage.

Over six decades she expanded it, brick by borrowed brick, into a home for her children, and a refuge for cousins between jobs, for neighbours, for funerals, and for strangers in passing need.

Her home worked as a living gift economy, proof that walls can be instruments of generosity. 1925 Glen Norah is the address of that house.

The house returns at the end of Postcard for the 61st Venice Biennale, in “A Family Album”: photographs from the Eluwasi family album, Glen Norah.

It was in this community that I first encountered the lamb, as Catholic iconography at St Patrick’s Church, Glen Norah Parish.

In Christian theology the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, embodies innocence and willing sacrifice. Across Abrahamic and African cosmologies its meaning reaches further: renewal, protection, the communal feast.

Carried into the brand, the lamb is a shorthand for the house’s ethic of shelter.

In David Hammons’s “Dakar Raffle” (2004), live sheep became lottery prizes, turning the lamb into a currency of care that circulates outside market logic.

The brand’s tagline, Diamond Water · Paradox of Praxis, extends that idea.

Adam Smith’s diamond–water paradox asks why essential water is cheap while useless diamonds are valuable. Francis Alÿs’s “Paradox of Praxis 1” (1997) shows a block of ice pushed through Mexico City until it disappears: labour invested in an object that vanishes.

Together they frame fragrance as diamond water: a liquid no one needs for survival, yet one breath can unlock grief healed, courage sparked, or the memory of a home.

Its true cost is carried in emotion, not in coin, the same way my grandmother’s hospitality accrued value beyond money.

25 May 2025, Africa Day. 1925 GLEN NORAH launched at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, with the campaign installed in the gallery’s balcony space.