The Secret to reality is that Everything is just a dream... and it is only when Dreams are seeded onto the infinite soil of our imagination that they can manifest into our World...
In West Africa, the griots were the guardians of the memory of the community, which they transmitted through stories, poems and music. I see my practice as a continuation of this great tradition. Stories are at the core of the way through which humans project themselves into the world. The stories we tell ourselves shape our understanding of the past and at the same time, provide us with a path towards the future.
History shows us that civilizations are cyclicals, they rise and they fall and I am interested to explore what a rebirth could look like in the context of the African continent. For the last 8 years, I have been creating works and hosting cultural experiences in and outside of the continent, as a means of interrogating the African future. In 2012, I launched Afro-Polis, a curatorial platform whose aim was to facilitate a multi-disciplinary exploration and critical discovery of Africa's cultural DNA, by fostering a participatory forum through talks, exhibitions and immersive experiences.
This ongoing investigation led me to create A.Polis, a fictional mythology positioning Africa as the primordial eden and articulating a prophetic path towards the future of the continent.
First introduced at the Vitra Summer Campus of 2015 (during Art Basel), in the form of a food art installation, consisting of a geometric arrangement of cubic cakes against a backdrop of imagery relating to a virtual African metropolis, the concept later evolved into the Dream lounge. Introduced at the 2019 African Crossroad, in Mombasa, the Dream Lounge was an immersive dreamscape fusing storytelling and future thinking, and whose goal was to help the public unleash its imagination in considering what society could look like in the context of an ideal future.
TOGUNA is the culmination of these last eight years of research.
An interactive forum for a panafrican conversation on the future of the continent, centered around the idea of the African Renaissance, as a mythical space for a social, cultural and spiritual rebirth of the African continent.
Welcome to the future !