DO not ask me who came up with the expression that a mistake in London or New York soon becomes fashion in Lagos. In the last few years, I have been in search of mistakes that may transform into a fad in Lagos or Lubumbashi, I have found none but instead, I have come across people in fashion who appear like mobile works of art. To open them up one needs a hook that would turn on their faucet of words and ideas.
If this page were a platform for confession, I just would tell the truth to make the devil ashamed: I was lost in the bowels of London and a conversation of any kind would be a tonic to my troubled mind. It was while seeking a strand for navigation that I accidentally encountered Becky (I later found out her official name is Rebecca Korn on the Internet). How did it start? I simply asked her if I could take her picture and she said yes, I snapped away hoping to do what I could not tell. I just wanted the pictures for my archive.
If you are not in a hurry, I tell you there is a story up my sleeves, you just must wait as I reconstruct part of what happened on Saturday, June 15, 2024. Please do not expect me to tell you all that transpired on a journey of less than 34 minutes.
Becky and I got onto Bus 84 just in time before the driver started the engine to set off. It did not take more than five minutes before warmth crept into our conversation. She worked very hard not to give out too many details about herself but the Lagos Boy in me would not accept such a show of coldness. I discovered before long that she is a lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts in London. What she would not freely tell me, the master-know-it-all offered all I needed to know.
“She is an interdisciplinary artist who has taken part in numerous exhibitions within the UK and abroad, (she is also a) part of an international collaborative drawing project ‘Drawing Dialogue’ and is also a member of the cross-disciplinary, international research group, PeARL: Performance Artistic Research Lab.” Remember I knew nothing about any of these while we sat next to each other. If you ask me why I opened my mouth to initiate a dialogue with her in the world of #metoo. Anyway, her story gets interesting when you read about her line of creativity or what Lagos Bobo would term Krazitivity,
“Her own practice-led research stems from an ongoing fascination with the intersections between art and science; especially in relation to biomedical science and the body. Recent interests have turned to the posthuman body. Investigating ideas around symbiosis, sympoiesis and speculative futures, where she considers re/imaginings of how bodies may adapt and evolve through learning from and with our non-human counterparts.” I am sure like me you may be wondering what symbiosis, sympoiesis, and speculative futures mean or connote. The answers may never come in this lifetime but any time I move close to the temple of meaning you all will be the first to know. What I can offer for now is that the notion of posthuman appears to be current. For instance, the 11th Asixoxe (Let’s Talk!) Conference on African Philosophy focused on the “Non-Human Animal in African Philosophy: A Reconfiguration of Humanity and the Non-Human from an African perspective.” In fact, on June 13, 2024 a paper by professor Alena Rettová, University of Bayreuth, Germany looked at a “phenomenology of death: Human and animal death in two Swahili texts.” In her presentation, she talked about how in death the body becomes the repository of animals and the corpse itself becomes non-human again.
As these academic/morbid thoughts filled my mind, the Internet again brought me back to Becky’s creative corpus. Her practice, it is said, “centers around ideas concerning the body, primarily the lived experience of her own medically altered body. She utilises personal experience to develop a greater understanding of the body and the stories it can tell. Within this, she explores how the act of making, through and with the body, can be used to create new forms of bodily knowledge.” Did you read what I just read? I mean that part about her own medically altered body. Now I am super curious to know more about this new-age academic.
Her “current research interests include investigating the transformative process of light as a creative medium and how it can be used to [lay] emphasis [on] the lived, corporeal aspects of the body, as well as ideas around Performance-as-Static, exploring the photographic image as a piece of performance – in itself, rather than just the documentary by-product of a performative event.” I recall Becky telling me about using light in her new work but all she said was above my pay grade. Reading the same idea in text brings meaning home from its locked store. “She is one part of an artist duo with Riga-based artist Anastasia Shneps-Shneppe, where they probe the permeable boundaries of their interdisciplinary practices across photography, sculpture, and performance-making. Their research explores water as a co-collaborator, ecotones as a place of unlimited possibility and transformation, and the diatom as their non-human odd-kin and facilitator of new work. They have been part of an interdisciplinary knowledge exchange with Hydrobiologists and Diatomists from the University of Latvia and the Latvian Environmental, Geological, and Meteorological Centre, and have recently won a commission to make new public sculptural work for the Sculpture Quadrennial Riga festival taking place in 2024.” If you know any Diatomists around please I would like to have a word with such a person.
Now, do you believe me when I say the road is home to stories but only if you are bold and brave to draw out dialogue from complete strangers? You just cannot tell who is sitting next to you on public transport.
