Zemni is the name used by Linda Mayoux in her art and photography work.
Zemni was originally a blind mole rat (Spalax typhlus), though there seems to be some disagreement on the web as to whether he was a native of Ukraine or also Eastern Europe and Asia. His eyes and ears are rudimentary. He is not a particularly pretty creature. When well-fed, he is quite plump with wrinkly skin hanging in folds of soft brownish fur tinged with gray. He spends most of his time bumbling or rushing around blindly, constructing extensive burrows – well worn and seemingly endless routes in the dark in search of some direction. Click here for a picture of Zemni.
Through a hole on the Internet he migrated to UK and in 2010 he started working as the brandname for a group of Young Enterprise students in Cambridge. Under leadership from Liam-Mayoux-Andrews, he was trying mostly to make a profit, but with a slight ethical edge helping to market coffee from Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union in Uganda. Once the students had successfully finished their studies and won various awards, he was out of a job.
But along the way Zemni had attracted the attention of Linda Mayoux, Liam’s mother. She was looking for a logo and concept for her photography and art work. To enable the creative part of her life to be independent from her professional work as consultant in International Development, and be freer to find its own direction. Click here for links to details about Linda.
So in July 2012 Zemni had a change of career, and a serious gender and moral identity crisis. She now travels a lot to Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as Europe and US. Her work supports that of Linda – promoting gender and social justice and developing participatory action planning planning tools to help communications between people who cannot read and write and powerful people who affectvtheir lives. Through this work she gets a chance to see many amazing things which most people do not have access to – and many opportunities to get to know many people doing inspiring things. She wants to establish processes for collaborative art, photography, video and web communications as part of peoples’ own documentation of their lives.
But she also wants to maintain her own separate identity in her attempt to communicate her thoughts about life and visions for making this a more beautiful world.