“Being Black is a creative act.” — André 3000
Locations: Ikeduru, Imo State, Nigeria; Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and in conversation with Red Hill, St. Thomas, Jamaica
Rooted in practices of working with and nurturing plants, which I inherit through my maternal lineage, this creative practice-based research explores ecological life and repair through ancestral relation. This work confronts the Institute of Geography’s (University of Edinburgh) entanglements with Caribbean plantation enslavement, while honouring ancestors through archival autoethnography, embodied artmaking with plantlife, and site-specific installation. Developed since 2023, the project emerges from my situated experience as an Igbo diasporan and Black Geographer working within the Institute, extending my Black Geographies work into a creative practice of remembrance, reckoning, and repair.
The site-specific installation includes both material elements (cyanotype hanging installation) and soundscape that tells a story of Black relationality and the intense entanglements between these trans-atlantic and interconnected geographies: Edinburgh (Scotland), Red Hill (southeastern Jamaica), and Igboland (southeastern Nigeria).
Worldmaking through the Black spatial poetics of Igbo masquerade (2024-)
Drawing on Igbo cosmological spatialities as geographic knowledge and practice, this interdisciplinary project weaves together creative and qualitative methods to explore Igbo masquerade in southeastern Nigeria as a Black, poetic, world-making spatial practice. Bringing together poetry, drama, interviews, and sensory ethnography, this project analyses the masquerade’s poetic and performative meanings as spatial expressions.
Previous research and projects:
Children’s community space experiences in Nima: Tracing racializing assemblages of the human (collaborative PhD research with Spread-Out Initiative NGO; Accra, Ghana – 2019-2020)
Akwaaba Photo: Youth Photography Workshop and Exhibition (Accra, Ghana – 2017)
Street vendor exclusion in “modern” market planning (Kumasi, Ghana – 2016-2017)
Park(ing) Day – Children’s Pop-up Park (Accra, Ghana – 2013)
Land Use & Transport Research Study for the Accra Pilot BRT Project (Accra, Ghana – 2010)
“Bringing the Community In: Expanding the Space for Community Planning in the Water Sector, Lagos, Nigeria” (Lagos, Nigeria – 2010)
