When Portuguese sailors arrived on the coast of West Africa, they encountered objects used in ritual practices: sticks, bones, hair, stones, and other seemingly ordinary materials invested with spiritual significance.

Unable to place these objects within their own systems of belief, the Portuguese referred to them as feitiços—a term associated with magical or enchanted objects. From this emerged the word “fetish,” which has since come to describe an intense, often inexplicable attachment to a thing.

A fetish is an intimate connection with an object; a relationship that cannot necessarily be explained or shared by others. To bond with something is to understand it on a level reached through personal experience and interpretation.

Why can this longing not be of the earth? Why can it not be built by my own hands—a rock, a stick, or something entirely different?

I connect. I interpret. I build. I dissect. I create. I understand.

This is my fetish.

Something made from nature, transformed through my own hands and given meaning through my own experience. Something tangible, visible, and felt. Nothing out there can quite compare to what I have created from what was already there.

photos © Raphael Fischer-Dieskau