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If the body cannot touch a specific thing, I start thinking about how I can allow the body to be alive in such a way that something else is triggered. Before thinking of extractions, I was interested in landscapes. I was born in Nigeria and it was where I lived for many years. Moving through the landscape you often wonder ‘what is going on?’. You see places being burned, houses being built, the landscape continually shifting. I was interested in understanding why this was: why are more and more trees being cut? Later, I would come back to Nigeria and see an area that used to have lots of trees totally stripped back, and then I would see an economy sprouting. Between living in Europe and going to Brazil, I started to understand that a certain kind of landscape exists across a shared economic line. When I’m in Brazil I feel like I’m in Nigeria. When I’m in Lagos or Ife, somehow, I could feel the same in the Middle East. That opened up thinking about labour, the residues of workers’ l ives and trying to understand how we got here. My interest also came from an economic question linked with landscape and ownership of land, one which is embedded in the African context, along with the cost of labour. I realised that some countries are supposed to be a source of raw materials, but not to have industry, because once you start having industry, that means you’re creating and you’re adding value to the raw products. In 2014, I did a project at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt and I began to understand how metals were made before colonial times, and the relationship we then had with the extraction of materials from the earth. Blacksmiths were seen as magicians because they could harness fire, water, earth and wind. They were high in the social hierarchy and had a special place at court. The introduction of ingots and beaten metal changed the dynamics of ownership and knowledge to one of extraction. I learned that in a very fundamental way, just by looking at objects from a specific time. This led me to try to understand what it means today. There is a lot of access to things and knowledge, but at the same time, there is also a lot of obscurity. My interest in the dynamics of extraction comes from just living in it. It’s our reality, and there is no way to get out of it. This exhibition includes a pair of prints, titled In Rage and After Rage, both from this year. They depict a woman who is part of the landscape, her fragmented body pinned back together. Her hair is a dark storm cloud. It made me wonder how the issues of extraction, labour and economy affect you as an artist whose creativity and energy are in demand by a range of partners, from museums and galleries to biennales and the art market. In a more self-reflexive sense, how do you experience this, and how do you resist those extractive tendencies? It may be the training I had with my mother, who made us work. She was great because she would say, ‘you have to do what you love’. And that’s if you are privileged and able to, because it’s not all the time that you’re able to do what you love, but because of my circumstances I have been able to do what I love. My mother said, ‘that’s the only thing that will allow you to grind and go through things’, because if you don’t love something, you will break down, because you’re going against the grain. I’m going with the grain. If I do not enjoy what I’m making or what I’m doing, then it’s of no use doing it. It has to be something that I stand for now and in the long term. When it comes to biennales, there are many things to consider. There are people I want to work with, but if I feel that we do not align, I stop – it’s of no use. There has to be an alignment that allows for the continuity of things. There are places I will not show my work, just as there are places where I don’t take a fee because I know why I’m doing it and for whom. It’s always a negotiation. My main pressure is time: time to think and make and experiment. The carpets I make can take two years to prepare, the ropes I make, I’ve been working on for three years. These experiments collapse and collide, and once in a while something comes out. There are some people who I have been collaborating with for 10, 15 years, others that I have just started working with. So it’s really a journey, and there are some people I have ended relationships with because it didn’t work out. 2 Confluence – Afterglow, 2024 Wetin You Go Do?, 2015, installation view, 13th Biennale de Lyon Art Monthly no. 478, July – August 2024
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You have a transnational background: you grew up in Lagos and lived and studied in Ife, Paris and Amsterdam and have settled in Antwerp. How have these different places influenced your work? One of the main influences was Professor Agbo Folarin, my lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife. We never had our classes in the classroom because he would take us out to explore Ife, which is the cradle of Yoruba culture. He would take us to sites, to understand how we use mud to build houses because we have lateritic rocks and earth. We would dig and find these pebbles in the ground. We learned that this was also how the people who came back from Brazil to Nigeria in the 19th century built houses. In a way he was bringing us to other worlds just by going through the landscape. I’m not Yoruba, I’m Ibibio, but that’s how I learned a lot about Yoruba culture. Later, when I went to Ouro Preto in Brazil, I recognised the pebbles: they were my pebbles. All of a sudden, it was a collapse of worlds, because after people were taken out of the African continent to Brazil, and their descendants had paid off their debts and managed to become free, they came back to the continent, where they built amazing houses that were a mixture of Portuguese, Brazilian and Yoruba traditions. When I go through the world, I can understand how certain things make sense: if I’m in Houston and I’m looking at the row houses, I can recognise them in relation to African architecture. In the Emirates, there are things that I recognise, and those things allow me to feel at home everywhere. But it’s not only about thinking; if I touch a rock that I can also find somewhere else, that rock makes me feel that I belong. There are places we go to and feel good because they are our commons. Like water: no matter where we go in the world, if we see water, it does something to us because it connects our geographies. One of these global connectors that turns up in your work is the art of textiles. You have long worked with tapestry and weavings, which have a long history in Flanders, where you live, but also make me think about textiles from West Africa. In both of those traditions, sumptuous textiles are associated with nobility and power, as well as having a creative and storytelling capacity. What draws you to textiles and what do they allow you to do in your art that other materials cannot? As a teenager I used to make a lot of batik with my mother. It’s one of my precious memories: going to the market and looking at fabrics and yarns and recognising, ‘Oh that’s organza, that’s chino, that’s viscose’. It’s how I learned about synthetic materials and natural fibres and dyes, natural and synthetic. I come from a place where fabrics like Aṣọ òkè and Akwete cloth were woven, and I could see women weaving, making fabrics for clothing. It has always been about identity. When you think of Aṣọ òkè, if you’re getting married, or attending a burial, your family buys a certain bundle of yarn that everybody wears to identify as part of the same group. There are many social aspects of tapestry, including storytelling. In Yoruba culture, the batik and drawing bring the stories into the fabric. I was also looking at the range of materials, like kola nut and indigo dye, used to create the tone of certain fabrics. That made me understand why we always wear browns and blues and certain reds, but never bright colours. I started to understand how the types of resources available from the land you lived on determined the different materials you could wear or possess. And with the movement of goods, the history of the silk route, or routes from Timbuktu to China, I understood how materials moved from one place to another. When I think of tapestry, it’s not only about natural fabrics, but also about the high-tech fabrics and yarns of today, and understanding how to work with them – for example, if I’m looking for a shine or depth, or how to create transparencies. I’m interested in innovations in yarns, but at the same time in pushing deeper into how to work with tapestry, to insert and weave in narratives or things that are linked to the landscapes we live in, such as histories linked with extraction and the climate. I’m asking how tapestry can inform and be an extension of places that you will not see, or ideas you will not necessarily think of. In your Sunburst tapestry there seem to be many different elements or layers, providing tactile or visual qualities – some hard, others soft, tight, loose, shiny, transparent – in addition to pictorial aspects. There are four layers to that tapestry. It’s a new thing I’m working with, it’s like I’m exploding the tapestry. With each layer, I can throw in a story that I want to include, but that I can also hide. If you were to shred the whole thing, you would be able to get it, but otherwise the only way you can know the story is through the accompanying cartoon. With Sunburst, I was thinking of when the sun heats something it’s like shredding or melting and exploding the layers, and as one thing melts another thing is revealed. Everything in the show is related to fire, whether emotional or material, or something that has gone through fire or something that looks like the colour of fire. It’s in the blues, the darkness and the heat of Sunburst. When I made this tapestry, I was thinking of how to actually shred it, and to use materials that create transparency. I wanted to sculpt the tapestry. I was looking f or a way to hold the warp, but I did not want us to see the weft. So I worked with monofilaments, which are transparent. It looks like something is floating, but the lines are straight as they come out of the machine. So what I do is scratch it through to the second layer, and then I can open it up to the third layer. The only way that tapestry looks the way it looks is through the scratch. We think of tapestry as this highly ordered thing, which makes sense because otherwise the image would be distorted, but you are going in and manipulating it into what you want it to be. Yes, I’m hiding what I do not want you to see, and revealing what I want to reveal, but I’m putting everything in there. We’re in a world where you have to think twice about how you’re saying what you want to say or what My interest in the dynamics of extraction comes from just living in it. It’s our reality, and there is no way to get out of it. Art Monthly no. 478, July – August 2024 3

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If the body cannot touch a specific thing, I start thinking about how I can allow the body to be alive in such a way that something else is triggered.

Before thinking of extractions, I was interested in landscapes. I was born in Nigeria and it was where I lived for many years. Moving through the landscape you often wonder ‘what is going on?’. You see places being burned, houses being built, the landscape continually shifting. I was interested in understanding why this was: why are more and more trees being cut? Later, I would come back to Nigeria and see an area that used to have lots of trees totally stripped back, and then I would see an economy sprouting. Between living in Europe and going to Brazil, I started to understand that a certain kind of landscape exists across a shared economic line. When I’m in Brazil I feel like I’m in Nigeria. When I’m in Lagos or Ife, somehow, I could feel the same in the Middle East. That opened up thinking about labour, the residues of workers’ l ives and trying to understand how we got here.

My interest also came from an economic question linked with landscape and ownership of land, one which is embedded in the African context, along with the cost of labour. I realised that some countries are supposed to be a source of raw materials, but not to have industry, because once you start having industry, that means you’re creating and you’re adding value to the raw products. In 2014, I did a project at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt and I began to understand how metals were made before colonial times, and the relationship we then had with the extraction of materials from the earth. Blacksmiths were seen as magicians because they could harness fire, water, earth and wind. They were high in the social hierarchy and had a special place at court. The introduction of ingots and beaten metal changed the dynamics of ownership and knowledge to one of extraction. I learned that in a very fundamental way, just by looking at objects from a specific time. This led me to try to understand what it means today. There is a lot of access to things and knowledge, but at the same time, there is also a lot of obscurity. My interest in the dynamics of extraction comes from just living in it. It’s our reality, and there is no way to get out of it.

This exhibition includes a pair of prints, titled In Rage and After Rage, both from this year. They depict a woman who is part of the landscape, her fragmented body pinned back together. Her hair is a dark storm cloud. It made me wonder how the issues of extraction, labour and economy affect you as an artist whose creativity and energy are in demand by a range of partners, from museums and galleries to biennales and the art market. In a more self-reflexive sense, how do you experience this, and how do you resist those extractive tendencies? It may be the training I had with my mother, who made us work. She was great because she would say, ‘you have to do what you love’. And that’s if you are privileged and able to, because it’s not all the time that you’re able to do what you love, but because of my circumstances I have been able to do what I love. My mother said, ‘that’s the only thing that will allow you to grind and go through things’, because if you don’t love something, you will break down, because you’re going against the grain. I’m going with the grain. If I do not enjoy what I’m making or what I’m doing, then it’s of no use doing it. It has to be something that I stand for now and in the long term. When it comes to biennales, there are many things to consider. There are people I want to work with, but if I feel that we do not align, I stop – it’s of no use. There has to be an alignment that allows for the continuity of things. There are places I will not show my work, just as there are places where I don’t take a fee because I know why I’m doing it and for whom. It’s always a negotiation.

My main pressure is time: time to think and make and experiment. The carpets I make can take two years to prepare, the ropes I make, I’ve been working on for three years. These experiments collapse and collide, and once in a while something comes out. There are some people who I have been collaborating with for 10, 15 years, others that I have just started working with. So it’s really a journey, and there are some people I have ended relationships with because it didn’t work out.

2

Confluence – Afterglow, 2024

Wetin You Go Do?, 2015, installation view, 13th Biennale de Lyon

Art Monthly no. 478, July – August 2024

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