Bubblegum Club

Tag: social justice

  • Artist Modupeola Fadugba on chance, human agency and conquering fears

    Artist Modupeola Fadugba on chance, human agency and conquering fears

    Modupeola Fadugba, born in Togo and now based in Nigeria, is an artist who made a 180 degree turn from her studies in engineering, economics and education. However, these have not left been left behind, with elements of economics and education sprinkled on the conceptual foundations of certain artworks. Fadugba focuses on identity, women’s empowerment and social justice within the sociopolitical milieu of Nigeria. Paint, drawing, burnt paper and installations are the mediums through which she creates her socially engaging work.

    Her 2016-2017 series Synchronized Swimmers takes its point of departure from an intimate and innocent memory she had as a child growing up in Lome. This memory was her fear of the sea, its vastness was too daunting and confusing to comprehend. The pools she was exposed to when she moved to the US for a while were less frightening, but her fear of the water remained until faced with compulsory lap-swimming classes at boarding school in England, aged eleven. Her first long drawn lap left her with a sense of accomplishment, and made her realize the water could be conquered. 20 years later in Nigeria she found herself facing another water-related fear, diving. With encouragement from her brother she leapt into the water from the diving board. While these may seem silly, they acted as forms of encouragement for her art, having decided to delve into the art world full time. Fadugba’s ‘pool’ works fall into two series of painting, Tagged (2015-2016) and Synchronized Swimmers (ongoing). Tagged sees a group of young women moving under and over the water in pursuit of a red ball. Synchronized Swimmers on the other hand sees young women clustering their bodies and hands together to lift one another into the sky. The red ball still makes an appearance, but the figures do not pay attention to it. Fadugba’s combination of acrylic, oil and burnt paper give the paintings a mysterious and confusing atmosphere, and yet the figures make the work visually appealing.

    ‘Synchronized Swimmers’

    A second collection of work titled Heads or Tails (2014-2017) sees Fadugba unpack the Latin motto that appears on the American dollar bill – Annuit cœptis.In her artists statement she explains that “the US Mint translates Annuit cœptis as ‘He [God] has favoured our undertakings,’ and the United States’ official motto—’In God We Trust’—emblazoned across the centre of the bill leaves no doubt as to God’s supreme presence. Yet the original Latin could be more accurately translated as ‘our undertakings have been favoured’; there is no direct mention of God, no certainty as to who is bestowing the favour.” With this interpretation Fadugba questions the certainty of who does the watching over, and who receives the favour. Heads or Tails looks at the themes of chance and value and how they determine the course of people’s lives. The series consists of paper painted coins of various sizes, with the faces of Black women appearing on them. These paintings appear on burnt paper. The coins and combined with the title point to the idea of the coin toss, a recurring theme in Fadugba’s work, signaling her preoccupation with luck and human agency.

    Her artist statements and explanations of her work channel the creative writing spirits of Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with their poetic and relatable nature.

    To check out more of Fadugba’s work visit her website.

    ‘Heads or Tails’
    ‘Heads or Tails’
    ‘Synchronized Swimmers’

  • Patti Anahory // cross-disciplinary contemplations about urban imaginaries

    Born on a ship on the way to São Tomé and Príncipe, Patti Anahory lived there for 7 years before being raised in Cabo Verde. She ventured off to the US to do her undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture. Throughout her studies Anahory maintained a desire to locate her work and sites of inquiry in and about Africa. This was initially a challenge as her formal architecture education offered little flexibility with regards to the content that could be explored as a student. At the end of her undergraduate education at the Boston Architecture College she won a travelling scholarship that allowed her to spend a month in South Africa. She later went to Princeton University to complete her graduate studies and Anahory began to direct her academic pursuits towards the continent. Her thesis project focused on Dakar, Senegal.

    This required Anahory to present loaded justifications to demonstrate why African cities should be viewed as legitimate sites for research within architectural academic programs. Her persistence continued to motivate her until she was awarded the prestigious Rotch Traveling Scholarship in 2000 through a two-stage architecture design competition. From this she was able to visit cities in East and West Africa. This was a significant moment for her, as she was still on the search for thematics that were able to unpack social, cultural and geo-political understandings of African cities. It also presented her with the opportunity to affirm that African cities are legitimate sites of inquiry. Anahory explains the significance of this by stating that around 2000 there were only a few architects engaging with African cities from this vantage point, or at least few getting recognized for doing so. “So you start to see your work as a political act because it was so out of the mainstream ways of looking into architecture, and modes of knowledge production about architecture,” she explains.

    Reflecting on the attitudes of the scholarship committee for the competition Anahory shares that, “they just could not understand the production of space and architectural critical thinking as a contemporary issue in Africa.” Her choice to explore East and West African countries allowed for a moment of rupture from her formal architectural education which did not place any emphasis on the contemporary conditions of the African city. After over a year of travelling she had to return to New York and worked as a freelance architect. A few years later her home country called her back.

    She was offered the opportunity to help setup a multidisciplinary research centre at Cabo Verde’s first public university. This presented an exciting challenge to setup an agenda for the relevant issues relating to the Cabo Verde built environment. This was a joint effort with her colleague Andreia Moassab at the centre with whom she shared similar interests in postcolonial studies, decolonising knowledge within the field of architecture as well as an exploration of how to think about development strategies and appropriate paradigms.

    While serving as director at the research centre, Anahory co-founded an art collective called XU:Collective with Andreia, who was  research coordinator, and Salif Diallo Silva, who was responsible for the research group on design and territory. “We decided we want to create a parallel practice that would allow us more freedom and a different language from scientific research and academic institutionalized setting, to speak about things such as environmental and social justice. Things we were addressing at the university but in a different way. In many ways the university and the collective informed each other,” she explains. An artistic language also allowed a different way to engage with society and to reach a larger public.

    When responding to my question about her views on architecture, urban planning and development on the continent, she expressed that rethinking new paradigms on all levels is important. This also involves how we can contribute more to cities and more sustainable development. “We also need to think and speculate about what future we want, and what kind of theoretical basis we want to produce. There are those of us carefully thinking about what kind of practice we want. Architecture is not only about producing buildings and objects, but also about critically thinking about our contemporary moment,” she explains.

    Due to this Anahory, like many others, has to take on multiple roles to tackle the double burden of contributing to an intellectual discourse while presenting a shift in what is seen as knowledge and how it is produced. “You have to be acting in so many realms in order to feel like you are making a change or contributing towards something,” she expresses.

    Working on curating her independent practice, Anahory continues to invest in urban activism and advocacy.  “I can only try to contribute to a more just city. And our cities and our models for development are very much imported from outside an in a neoliberal logic.” This is done through projects with young urban activists, specifically in neighbourhoods that have been neglected in terms of physical and social infrastructure.

    Considering that African Mobilities is a platform that offers multiple avenues for contemplating city-ness and all its associates (identity, culture, physical and social infrastructure, etc.), the inclusion of Anahory in the Praia Exchange made sense considering her experience in having to justify the exploration of contemporary Africa outside of the framework set out by western epistemological agendas.

    From the get go the participants bonded over questioning the terminology of “Lusophone” Africa, (as with “Francophone” and “Anglophone”) and the imaginaries they invoke. Anahory, speaking from an island perspective, and highlighting the ambiguous relationship Cabo Verde has with the rest of the continent, was able to present how our collective imaginaries from these labels craft our identities and place us closer or further apart. Drawing on the parallels between Luanda and Praia, cross-disciplinary investigations and conversations opened up new questions and debates.

    Anahory will be coming to South Africa again this year as a visiting research fellow at University of Johannesburg. Perhaps the Praia Exchange has offered a point of departure for the time she will spend here.

  • Exploring the place of social justice and sustainability in urban planning and design

    OluTimehin Adegbeye is a Nigerian speaker, writer, and activist. Her work is derived from a self-perceived duty to social justice with a focus on gender, class, sexualities and sexual violence. Other concerns addressed in her work are Sustainable Development and Urban Poverty.

    When asked about her career path, OluTimehin expresses “I don’t know that I ‘chose’ to follow this career path; I speak and think about problems that seem to me to be pressing and in need of urgent engagement. In the course of that, opportunities present themselves, and I take those which help me inspire more people to engage with our societies’ many ailments where gender, class and other sites of marginalisation are concerned.”

    OluTimehin gave her first TED Talk titled “White Sands, White Flags: The Demolition of Lagos State Waterfront Communities” at TEDLagos Ideas Search in February of this year. Her second TED Talk titled “Who Belongs in a City?” was held at TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania. She was also a speaker on several panels that include “Rewriting Herstory: Harnessing the Power of Feminist Writing Platforms and Networks at the Black Feminisms/AWID Forum” (Brazil, 2016), “Spirit Women at ChaleWote: Spirit Robot” (Ghana, 2016) as well as “Intersections: Culture, Social Justice and Feminist Narratives” (Ghana, 2016).

    Her writing has been published in multiple languages and can be found in StyleMANIA Magazine (Nigeria), Klassekampen (Norway), Women’s Asia 21 (Japan) and Essays Magazine (South Africa) to name a few. Online, her writing has become part of the content in the African Women’s Development Fund, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and the African Feminist Forum, along with other platforms. Besides what has already been mentioned, OluTimehin is an alumna of the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop (Nigeria, 2015), the inaugural Writing for Social Justice workshop organised by AWDF in collaboration with FEMRITE (Uganda, 2014) and the Farafina and the BRITDOC Queer Impact Producers Lab (USA, 2017). The list of her written output continues to get longer, emphasizing her determination to address the social justices issues mentioned earlier.

    OluTimehin’s personal writing consists of memoir writing, autofiction, and poetry that explore motifs such as solidarity, autonomy, trauma, motherhood and radical love. Working towards the deconstruction of exploitative and aggressive power structures fortifying globalised societies, she aspires to re-inscribe the core value of human life.

    “I started to identify as a feminist in 2013 and since then I have benefited from and continue to contribute to many physical and digital communities that share stories and strategies about how to make our realities less violently exclusionary. I began engaging with questions of urban development about a year ago, and since then I’ve had opportunities to share my perspective on what an inclusive vision of my home city, Lagos, might be.”

    OluTimehin forms a part of African Mobilities‘ Friday Lecture series and shares the following thoughts on her involvement, “I think it was very discerning of the organisers in Lagos to think about not just the physical landscape, but also the social aspects of how the city functions, and thus to invite someone like me who doesn’t work in the traditional design space to speak to the impacts design, urban vision and ‘development’ might have on the populations of my city. I’m honoured to have been invited to add this perspective to the layers of discourse around African Mobilities.”

    Identifying as a decolonial feminist, OluTimehin is currently based in Lagos, and is actively working towards unravelling societal dilemmas from this viewpoint.

  • Sophia Nahli Allison – verbalizing silenced narratives through film and photography

    Sophia Nahli Allison – verbalizing silenced narratives through film and photography

    Sophia Nahli Allison is an experimental documentary filmmaker and media arts educator. History is highly contested, both as an academic subject and as an archive of living memories. Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his 1995 book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, he points out that history is constructed through power relations that allow the idea of a linear, meta history to be constructed through the strategic silencing of histories – histories often blocked out through othering. Allison’s focus is on re-imagining and documenting history – or histories – that are pushed out. This includes memories, dreams and multiple interpretations of freedom through the voices of women the youth and queer people of colour.

    Having received her BA in photojournalism, and working towards her postgraduate degree in documentary filmmaking, still and moving imagery are her mediums of choice with regards to materializing these ambitions. She has received recognition for her efforts, including being named the Student Video Photographer of the Year by the White House News Photographer Association earlier this year.

    Allison’s photographs possess a sense of movement. Viewers are transported into the moments she captures, and are easily able to feel the emotional vibrations translated through her lens. Each image is accompanied by the story of the people photographed as well as the conceptual labour she has invested into assembling each image. Her trained eye is a tool she employs to capture in-the-moment shots as calculated shots.

    Her work as a media arts educator has seen her teach high school students photography and film skills through a lens that focuses on social justice and identity. This is a way she continues the necessity to have other narratives seen and heard. In this way she encourages self-expression and the importance of socially conscious documentary work while explaining the significance of subliminal messaging that is often present in other forms of photography and film productions. Allison has seen how her courses have promoted critical thinking and self-awareness in the young students she has interacted with.

    Check out her website to have a look at more of her photographs and to view her short films.