Nkgopoleng Moloi, had a conversation with Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal about their work.
Olalekan Jeyifous is a Nigerian-born Brooklyn-based artist and designer with a background in architecture. His work examines constructions of urban utopias and dystopias with intersections between architecture, technology and culture. Wale Lawal is a Nigerian visual artist working as a writer and editor in Lagos. The pair collaborated on a project called “Mad Horse City,” — a series of animated and written illustrations describing life in a futuristic Lagos. The project was exhibited at the “Africa Is Not a Refugee Camp” exhibition in Munich, in 2018.
Nkgopoleng Moloi: When we talk about the future “African City”, we tend to think of what the city will look like visually — but what are the values that these future cities will or should embody?
Olalekan Jeyifous: While my work is more about generating critical discourse and sci-fi narratives within a kind of Afrofuturist context, some of the ideas explored in Shanty Mega-Structures and even Mad Horse City focus on community organization, informality, sustainability practices, ecology/climate, infrastructure, and collaboration that considers rapid population growth from a human-centered approach.
NM: Is there space for “megacities” in Africa? What do these mean for the poorest of the poor?
OJ: Well the term “megacities” refers to cities with a population in excess of ten million, of which in Africa there are several: Lagos, Cairo, Accra, Nairobi, etc. Rapid population growth and migration towards urban centres are factors that contribute to this and a lack of infrastructure in place to respond to this growth/migration has and continues to affect the poorest of the poor in the most violent and repressive ways.
If you are asking me how the poor fit into the current state of megacities, then the answer is they either don’t or face conditions that are fundamentally antagonistic to their existence. If you are asking me about what my personal vision is regarding how the most marginalized communities fit into future visions, the answer is: prominently.
As mentioned earlier, my futuristic imaginaries are first and foremost sci-fi stories that both illuminate and exacerbate contemporary issues in a way that places emphasis on these communities while presenting a building typology that is a counter-point to the kind of western/modernist architecture that defines many of the post-colonial civic buildings found throughout West Africa as well as the massive luxury hi-rise towers that define a kind of Western aspirational approach to large scale development. So, in a sense, the scale of Shanty Mega-Structures is far more about a kind of heavy-handed visibility as opposed to a realistic urban growth strategy. However, the idea of both the architecture of this world and the loosely governing body: A Chaordic Anarcho Technocracy or CHAT, is that population growth and the expansion of the architecture is organic and as-needed.
NM: Can you explain your thought process in the creation of the project; Moment Three — Dreamscapes? What were you hoping to achieve and why?
Wale Lawal: Dreamscapes was based on the idea of subverting authoritative gazes i.e. who’s watching who? There’s a long history of records that show the surveillance of Africans whether it be through the travelogues of European explorers in the early 19th century or the diaries kept by early European missionaries. Presently, we live in a time where notion of “gazes” is slightly more democratic. Through technology, Africans not only look back at the world, but also document this process of looking back and develop archives. What we wanted to show in this project, more specifically, was that even looking back is political. We tried to show how people may subvert local political systems of surveillance and control, to curate their own experiences of the world.
NM: I’m interested in the 3 choices you laid out for “assisted dreaming” in the film; Gore Island, scuba diving in the pacific ocean or mars….
WL: Firstly, the notion of “Assisted dreaming” is speculative. It exists in the context of a future in which it is not only possible to commodify the experiences of people as content (which we do nowadays) but also possible to create closer relationships between individuals and the experiences of other people beyond what is presently feasible. In this future, a “Dreamscape” is a platform that provides users the opportunity to re-live the experiences of other people as [artificial] dreams. There are essentially numerous locations in each user’s Dreamscape, but Gorée Island features in the film for its history as a slave port, its relevance as a site of memory; the Pacific Ocean features for its size, its distance from Nigeria (where the user, Sekoni, is based) as a way of showing the breadth of content a Dreamscape may feature and what questions that distance raises about the migratory immobility of Nigerians today; and Mars for the futurity of space, and how radical it still is to imagine Africans in both space and the future. These three sites are interesting in their respective rights, but they also hold significance to questions about the past, present and future of our world.
NM: It’s interesting to think of cities as places of desires and a hardening of souls when those desires seem further and further away. Do you have any thoughts on the topic of cities and “this wanting” that happens in cities?
OJ: Cities in the popular imagination evoke a sense of hustle, desire, drive, ingenuity, and ambition. They simultaneously embody notions of hope and despair. They are chaotic, frenetic places that operate in stark contrast to village life, suburban life, or farm life, which maintain a sense of either pastoral [dis]quietude or crippling inertia.
Cities are where one goes to stretch, expand, and dream on a much larger scale, at least ostensibly. There is a sense of opportunity being around every corner which, more often than not, we know to be a complete sham.
In my Shanty Mega- Structures world, the city is less about a “wanting” and more about “creating”, self- determination, and sustainability. At least it began that way; however entering into the interiority of the world for the Mad Horse City narratives produced certain dilemmas of its own.
NM: How do you see language changing as cities change?
OJ: This is a fascinating question that I’m not sure I can even begin to answer however I do know that technology/innovation not only “advances” industry but the ways we communicate, interact, and navigate space, which in turn changes the language; the idiomatic expressions, the slang, the shorthand, etc. Migration, trade, etc also changes how languages evolve which in the context of Africa and for example, Sino-African relations, will be very interesting
A cities evolution whether equitably or inequitably will determine the way the marginalized are spoken of and addressed, the rich, the middle-class, the entrenched and the newly arrived.
NM: I’m also interested in the idea of sleep and dreams and sleep as an escape. I walk around the city a lot and it’s always interesting to see how many homeless people spend their days sleeping (during the day). It gives you this sense that for them sleep is quite literally the only place where pleasure sits and exists. What are your thoughts on dreams, fragmented dreams and how this translates into how people be.
WL: I guess metaphorically as well since the idea of “dreaming” or “having dreams” is seen as virtuous. In some ways, Dreamscapes tries to explore the relationship between freedom and control. The act of dreaming is perhaps one of our oldest ways of experiencing virtuality and, to some extent, freedom. Dreaming is generally private and individual-oriented but also sacred in some way. We don’t exactly have the power to design the nature of our dreams; for this reason, dreams can be unpredictable, inconsistent or, as you say, fragmented. That’s exactly where assisted dreaming or “Dreamscape”, the programme, comes in. We speculate that in a world where the reach of capitalism and consumerism extend even to the realm of dreams, there is no escape from control. Neither are people at liberty to imagine beyond that which is constantly being curated, catalogued and made available by a community of others. Yes, individuals may use proxy servers and VPNs to get around things but to what end? A few questions that we hope will be inspired among viewers are whether Dreamscaping and dreaming are actually the same thing. Why, for instance, does Sekoni choose to die while Dreamscaping as opposed to naturally? And what happens when a person dies while Dreamscaping? Do they, for instance, experience eternity in the programme, and as such is Dreamscape really an escape?
NM: What subjects/ topics relating to movement and cities are you currently thinking about; could be a project or somethings you’re pondering on.
OJ: I’ve been working on several real-world commissioned projects that focus on the future of public transportation and I am incredibly fascinated by what that might look like, especially in the context of the African megacity.
I’m not quite sure how it will manifest, but it’s an issue of global urgency and no matter how far-reaching or far out my speculative artwork may be it is often rooted in some current crisis.
