Elewe
Elewe: Of the leaves
Odun Orimolade Oct 2023
Elewe is enabled through the international residency programme VILA SUL of the Frankfurt-based KfW Stiftung, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia in the Rethinking the South program. It responds to exploring feminist tradition and Yoruba connections inside Quilombo ethereal systems in relation to the living archives of plant systems and symbiotic energy. It connects to experiences through sound, ethnographic, absorbed, and reimagined memories of enslaved Africans and Indigenous communities in Salvador Bahia and how these traditions have survived.
The performance recognizes the imperative planetary contexts of indigenous and feminine knowledge systems, which are immediately impactful and apparent. The mural highlighted two things: first, the language and coding of plants as communication methods and secret methodologies of redirection, subversion, and reordering and manipulation of more imposing or oppressive communication and information norms found in archival systems, gathering, and content. It highlights the overwhelming influence and presence of sorority history in planetary contexts. These are apprehended through triggered thoughts of memory, present and continuous, that are facilitated by prospects of embodiment in performance contexts. Embodiment in this context comes through imagined and transferred memory that manifests through both the visualization of stories as well as narrative constructs.
Elewe is an intervention into existing energy that is already generated through the flora and fauna of the environment. The intent is to enter into the wavelengths through feminism strains in how information is stored, passed on, and preserved in the language and symbolism of leaves, seeds, roots, shoots, trunks, and other vegetative complexities. It explores female sorority coding systems as connections of past to present and memory preserved, continuing the subversion of patriarchal projections of archive systems and institutionalized memory through history propagation that affects current strains in socio-political navigations of spaces. Tacit memory is engineered through contact, connections, and interaction with the vegetation and the connective shared source support. The electro-neural connections of female bodies through spaces in the intervention and interaction in space as females tend to have more neuropil, the fibular tissue that fills the space between nerve cell bodies and contains mainly nerve cell processes allowing deeper cell communication (American Academy of Neurology, 1999). The plausible transcendence of communication might be something to observe in communication and interaction with organisms like plants. This is because plants do use forms of electrical connection (Calvo et al., 2017) and thus could be percolators for interconnection and interaction in ephemeral activities in cultural practices such as the Yoruba female ritual practices along West Africa and transplanted in Salvador Bahia. It also underscores how Yoruba women, as in Salvador Bahia and other regions of the world, have navigated resistance and repression.
It speaks to the retained energy of memory through space, which Henri Lefebvre (1996) supports in his interpretations of a "third space" as a spatial and temporal site, which confronts the notion of archives, histories, their dislocations, and interdependencies. Elewe proposes that energy is not destroyed; it is displaced, disbursed, transferred, and can reconfigure itself or return.
Further reading:
American Academy of Neurology. "Gender-Specific Differences Found In Human Brain." Science Daily. Science Daily, 22 April 1999. Available at: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/04/990422061106.htm accessed October 2023.
Barber, K. (1981) How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the ‘Orisa’. Africa:Journal of the International African Institute no. 51(3), pp. 734–745.
Calvo P, Gagliano M, Souza GM, & Trewavas A. (2020). Plants are intelligent, here's how. Ann Bot. Jan 8; 125 (1):11-28.
Capponi, G. (2018). The Garden and the Market: Human-Environment Relations and Collective Imaginary in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé between Italy and Brazil. Studia Religiologica. 51 (3): 165–177.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writing on Cities. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Olajubu, O. (2004). Seeing Through A Woman's Eye: Yoruba Religious Tradition and Gender Relations Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring), pp 41- 60.
Olajubu, O. (2003). Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere US: Mc Gill.
Pagnocca, Tiago & Zank, Sofia & Hanazaki, Natalia. (2020). “The plants have axé”: investigating the use of plants in Afro-Brazilian religions of Santa Catarina Island. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. 16. 10.1186/s13002-020-00372-6.
Odun Orimolade Oct 2023
Elewe is enabled through the international residency programme VILA SUL of the Frankfurt-based KfW Stiftung, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia in the Rethinking the South program. It responds to exploring feminist tradition and Yoruba connections inside Quilombo ethereal systems in relation to the living archives of plant systems and symbiotic energy. It connects to experiences through sound, ethnographic, absorbed, and reimagined memories of enslaved Africans and Indigenous communities in Salvador Bahia and how these traditions have survived.
The performance recognizes the imperative planetary contexts of indigenous and feminine knowledge systems, which are immediately impactful and apparent. The mural highlighted two things: first, the language and coding of plants as communication methods and secret methodologies of redirection, subversion, and reordering and manipulation of more imposing or oppressive communication and information norms found in archival systems, gathering, and content. It highlights the overwhelming influence and presence of sorority history in planetary contexts. These are apprehended through triggered thoughts of memory, present and continuous, that are facilitated by prospects of embodiment in performance contexts. Embodiment in this context comes through imagined and transferred memory that manifests through both the visualization of stories as well as narrative constructs.
Elewe is an intervention into existing energy that is already generated through the flora and fauna of the environment. The intent is to enter into the wavelengths through feminism strains in how information is stored, passed on, and preserved in the language and symbolism of leaves, seeds, roots, shoots, trunks, and other vegetative complexities. It explores female sorority coding systems as connections of past to present and memory preserved, continuing the subversion of patriarchal projections of archive systems and institutionalized memory through history propagation that affects current strains in socio-political navigations of spaces. Tacit memory is engineered through contact, connections, and interaction with the vegetation and the connective shared source support. The electro-neural connections of female bodies through spaces in the intervention and interaction in space as females tend to have more neuropil, the fibular tissue that fills the space between nerve cell bodies and contains mainly nerve cell processes allowing deeper cell communication (American Academy of Neurology, 1999). The plausible transcendence of communication might be something to observe in communication and interaction with organisms like plants. This is because plants do use forms of electrical connection (Calvo et al., 2017) and thus could be percolators for interconnection and interaction in ephemeral activities in cultural practices such as the Yoruba female ritual practices along West Africa and transplanted in Salvador Bahia. It also underscores how Yoruba women, as in Salvador Bahia and other regions of the world, have navigated resistance and repression.
It speaks to the retained energy of memory through space, which Henri Lefebvre (1996) supports in his interpretations of a "third space" as a spatial and temporal site, which confronts the notion of archives, histories, their dislocations, and interdependencies. Elewe proposes that energy is not destroyed; it is displaced, disbursed, transferred, and can reconfigure itself or return.
Further reading:
American Academy of Neurology. "Gender-Specific Differences Found In Human Brain." Science Daily. Science Daily, 22 April 1999. Available at: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/04/990422061106.htm accessed October 2023.
Barber, K. (1981) How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the ‘Orisa’. Africa:Journal of the International African Institute no. 51(3), pp. 734–745.
Calvo P, Gagliano M, Souza GM, & Trewavas A. (2020). Plants are intelligent, here's how. Ann Bot. Jan 8; 125 (1):11-28.
Capponi, G. (2018). The Garden and the Market: Human-Environment Relations and Collective Imaginary in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé between Italy and Brazil. Studia Religiologica. 51 (3): 165–177.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writing on Cities. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Olajubu, O. (2004). Seeing Through A Woman's Eye: Yoruba Religious Tradition and Gender Relations Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring), pp 41- 60.
Olajubu, O. (2003). Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere US: Mc Gill.
Pagnocca, Tiago & Zank, Sofia & Hanazaki, Natalia. (2020). “The plants have axé”: investigating the use of plants in Afro-Brazilian religions of Santa Catarina Island. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. 16. 10.1186/s13002-020-00372-6.