CAROLINE SOHIE

THE RED THAT STAINS

Tanzania, 2015 - 2025

Slow violence is like a nosebleed—first a trickle, then a heavy red spreads, staining daily life. In Bagamoyo, Tanzania, this erosion has been centuries in the making. Extraction and global encroachment unfold quietly, yet their traces are everywhere.

Once a waypoint on the East African slave trade route, this coastal town has long been shaped by external forces—colonial rule, resource extraction, and now, globalised investments that redraw its physical and social contours.

In the stillness of the image, I explore a violence of delayed destruction, dispersed across time and space. Behind an idyllic beauty, land, sea, and people are extracted, displaced, and recast in narratives not of their own making.

The images exist in an in-between—tradition and modernity, nature and urban, local and global—where identities shift like tides. My fragmented gaze echoes this fluid condition. Slow violence seeps in, imperceptible at first, until nothing is as it was. 

The red remains.