Afropolis 2024 set to hold at JK Randle Centre in Lagos
By Qudus Onikeku
AS we invite you for something very special, let us first invite an elder, Chinua Achebe, to usher us in with his cautionary words of wisdom:
“People go to Africa to confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there, in front of them.”
The curatorial theme for Afropolis 2024 is ‘We Need New Myths’. We are bringing together a crop of mind-bending international artistes-diviners, technologists, thinkers, makers, innovators, creatives and culture workers, for the first Afropolis on the African continent, to reflect on Lagos as a fugitive city, playing host to Black Magicians that perform magic.
Places are complex things: they constitute what has been done there, the quality and the nature of thought that has been had there, those that were birthed there, those that came and became indigenes and others that left to never return. A place is also defined by the way history has leaked into the landscape and shaped the people over time. Our environment naturally shapes our psychology, which then determines our mythology while our myths are the basis for developing our philosophy, and our indigenous philosophy, naturally, should be the bedrock for all our innovations in the arts, sciences and technology.
So, what happens when a society is ordered by hegemonic ideologies? This question acknowledges that prior to colonial invasions, our ancestors had aspirations for our societies; there must have been an imagined future in that great past. How long then does it take for a people to forget themselves completely? For there to be wholeness again, don’t we need to re/member? Here the notion of remembering the future is literal rather than poetic. Is it possible to reinstall an original operating system? The original destiny, I mean. Is an ideological surgery possible in a situation where the bodies and the organs of the patient have been dismembered, and scattered all across the globe? To re/member, don’t we need to first and foremost gather such bodies in close proximity, in the same place, at the same time?
In Africa, myths transfigure reality. They are public dreams, vehicles of communication between the past and the future. By myth, I mean the rituals and beliefs of a people, but I also mean the stale and worn-out misconceptions the world has about Africa as an essentially strange, dark continent, doomed with black magic. In order to see, smell, hear, and feel, that is, to sense existence in the appropriate mood, one will need to momentarily suspend disbelief and embrace a high level definition of realism as the representation of all that is present; i.e. what we sense, what we don’t sense and what cannot be sensed; i.e the seen, the unseen and the unseeable. Our perception makes our world; the world is, however, not totally as we see it, but as we perceive it.
Now there seems to be a tension between our double consciousness; the way we see ourselves from our own eyes, and the way we want the world to see us. Old myths are no longer operative in the direction of our redemption, and effective new myths have not arisen to replace them. As a result, our age is confused.
Our artists and activists, historians and journalists, administrators and managers, our culture custodians and urban culture curators, our scholars and engineers, coders and gamers, our thinkers, makers, and creatives at large have played the crucial role of re-establishing the cultural intelligence, the innovative thinking, and the knowledge production of our societies where it has been attacked. Pointing us to worlds unseen, clearing paths to make new roads towards the unknown and experiencing unimaginable adversity on their way. To have done that against all odds, they become a sort of magician, employing trickster approaches to place-making through shape-shifting, and time-bending storytelling skills in order for our societies to move forward. Although they are visible to the world around them, yet they are hard to capture, to understand – totally hidden in plain sight. Afropolis Lagos 2024 is for our stories and their tellers.
How then does a performance art festival show up in a way to elevate the genius of a city? Why are we proposing collective improvisation as a magical technology for our reawakening? If we are able to view traditional ceremonies in Africa and its Diaspora as works of performance art, we will note that what is at hand is a space and a time that exceed the dimensions of space and time, and that provokes a sense of communion among the actors involved, including the audience, because in reality there’s no such thing as audience, but participants.
In an African performance setting, the individual literally dissolves into the collective, much as in the state of trance, where we can no longer say who is who, what is here, when are we and where is this happening. The exchange between dancers and musicians does not occur on an intellectual level, but on an emotional, or dare we say, a magical plane. Performance art is, in its essence, a form of austerity; it is a language that allows us to bypass words, and discourse altogether – to say the unsayable; a way of transforming the chaotic world of sensations into a world of forms and representation, the stuff magic is made of; the kind of magic Africa retains an absolute mastery.
Afropolis is a pan-African gathering that celebrates the rich intersection of culture, performance, creativity, and innovation. This dynamic event will showcase local and international music concerts, performances, panel discussions, exhibitions, maker fair, pop up fashion stores, master classes, street arts, urban culture display, street food, e.t.c, featuring over 1,000 creatives and attracting over 20,000 attendees. We are thrilled to host this vibrant nine-day event in partnership with the Lagos State Government.
The wait is over. From October 26 – November 03, we gather in Lagos for what is to be the most important international arts, culture, creativity and innovation festival in 2024. Early birds registration to participate in afropolis 2024 is now on till September 30, 2024.
Come, let us write new myths!
@JK Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History, Onikan, Lagos Island.
Onikeku is Artistic Director of Afropolis
