FarBar: Sonic as Landscape with Mpho Matsipa, Olalekan Jeyifous, Wale Lawal & Dani Kyengo O'Neill
The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry invites you to a FarBar program of Sonic as Landscape with curator Mpho Matsipa, artist Olalekan Jeyifous, writer and researcher Wale Lawal, and composer Dani Kyengo O'Neill.
A Zoom link will be posted on the Gray Center's home page near the time of the event. Closed captions will be provided.
Conceived by Jeyifous, Lawal, Matsipa and Kyengo O’Neill as a sonic experiment in the development of the aural and visual landscape of the Lagos lagoon, "Sonic as Landscape" is a companion piece to Liquid Geographies, Liquid Borders, at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition curated by architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis, under the theme “How will we live together.”
Extending the second moment of Mad Horse City’s “Òmìnírá” (in Yoruba, means freedom), this collaboration is an on-going dialogue, spanning Brooklyn, Lagos, Johannesburg and Cape Town, that explores the sonic connections amongst oil-fueled movements and the lived spatialities of these polyphonic landscapes. Taking crude oil-spills as a point of departure, they explore extractive landscapes of the Nigerian Delta through the 1) Sonic textures and transmutations of oil; 2) Òmìnírá as a microcosm of the asymmetries of power, and 3) Post-oil futures.
Original Sound Recordings by:
Jason saGas – Sagas Recordings (Delta Region, Nigeria)
Oyefeso Oluwatobiloba, (Lagos, Nigeria)
Speakers:
Olalekan Jeyifous (American, b. 1977) is a Brooklyn-based visual artist/designer whose practice often re-imagines social spaces around issues relating to the relationship between architecture, community, and the environment. His work has been exhibited at venues such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim Bilbao
Wale Lawal (Nigerian, b. 1992) is a Lagos-based writer and was recently named to the Quartz list of top African innovators. Educated at the University of Bath, the London School of Economics, and the University of Oxford, Wale is a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Republic, a journal of Nigerian and African affairs.
Mpho Matsipa (South African, b.1977) trained as an architect and is an urban scholar and curator of African Mobilities, a multi-sited, curatorial project. Her research-driven curatorial practice aims to build transnational experimental research platforms and projects across Africa and the diaspora. She has curated exhibitions at the Architecture Museum at TU Munich, Studio x - Johannesburg, and the Venice Biennale. She is a research fellow at WiSER and a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, South Africa.
Dani Kyengo O'Neill (Kenyan-South African, b. 1993) is a composer, filmmaker, sound and spatial artist, and noisemaker. Their current research looks deeper into black sonic auralities, dialogues of riddim and gendered histories in the diaspora, experimental sound production, filmmaking, and somatics as liberatory practices informed by sound, assembly, gender, aural imagery, choreography, and Afrikan queer storytelling. They are based in South Africa and are currently completing their MA at the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town.
About FarBar:
Conceived as a way to maintain the ethos of our regular Sidebar series for the pandemic moment, FarBar is a vehicle for artistic and scholarly dialogue with practitioners from around the world. Throughout 2020-2021, our planned conversations with artists in Puerto Rico, Haiti, South Africa, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Chicago will revolve around translation, indigeneity, ecological and economic collapse, logics of extraction, crisis, and memory and the archive. Being online for the year will also enable the Gray Center to reach audiences well beyond our Chicago geography, so please invite your far-flung friends.
This article first featured on GrayCenter