Residenzprogramm Berlin-Lagos 2020
Mit Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó
September–November 2020
Despite the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global cultural scene, we are relieved to have jointly found a solution to continue the Lagos-Berlin residency programme by the Goethe Institut Nigeria together with the partners 16/16, Galerie Wedding, SAVVy Contemporary and ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics. We are honoered to welcome Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó to Berlin and her 3 months residency.
Afọpẹ́fólúwa is a writer, creative technologist, and experiential artist whose work engages our lived experiences, language, memory, experiments with form, the lyrical, and the mundane. One of her current projects is AN AFRICAN POET CRIES AT THE WIND – an attempt at creating a reading economy for African poetry outside of the structures and hierarchy of publishing and curation that inherently influence reading behaviours. Using a database of poems scraped from the internet and creating a database from an open call, the project will use a mailing list to randomly send out one poem a week to subscribers.
About her residency, she says: "Berlin is one of the most exciting cities. I am excited to enter into a space of innovation between two of the most exciting cities right now – Lagos and Berlin – cities bubbling on the edge of artistic expression. My work during this residency is to innovate the archive as a poem and as a future tool using future technology; to create a format of archiving where everybody becomes both active subject and object. Through this process of creating and learning, I hope to work together with amazing institutions like Goethe-Institut, SAVVY Contemporary, ZK/U, Galerie Wedding, and 16/16 to reimagine the possibilities of archiving and I expect to have a lot of fun in the process of interacting with the archive as a major part of our quotidian experience and also questioning in what ways it can be presented visually, artistically, sonically, technically, or otherwise."