Yorùbá culture - among other African spiritualities and cosmologies - has spread to many parts of the world and into many creative fields. It continuously attracts artists, scholars and spiritual practitioners alike. This relating to spiritual knowledge, aesthetic forms and the whole ‘house’ of Yorùbá features prominently in pop culture and contemporary arts not only in Nigeria but also globally - in particular in the Yorùbá diaspora in Brazil and Cuba. Yorùbá culture seems to be very inviting to these contemporary appropriations, of which change is an inherent factor.
Our short film “I am Ọṣun”, portrays four artists and their ways of working with the Òrìṣàs:
Filmmaker
Uyiekpen Nosakhare Igbinedion, visual artist
Mukhtara Yussuf, graphic designer
Abdulkareem Baba Aminu from Nigeria and the Brazilian artist
D’Andrade. In a mix of clippings from their various practices, they speak about their relationship to Yorùbá culture and the òrìṣàs in particular, how they got in contact with them and the Yorùbá knowledge, philosophy and spirituality. They also talk about potential limits and threats, if we go too far with making this knowledge visible and audible, about respect for the sources, and about what one can learn in the process of working with this knowledge.
This screening is the second in a series of three events, in which iwalewabooks and the Goethe-Institut Lagos invite you to get to know the book project "Who’s Who in the Yorùbá Pantheon" (iwalewabooks, 2020). The publication aims at, in the words of illustrator Abdulkareem Baba Aminu, “presenting the òrìṣàs to a whole new generation of Nigerians and non-Nigerians, inspiring pride, restoring a sense of history and culture for the coming decades."
We invite you to join this cinematic conversation between Uyiekpen Nosakhare Igbinedion, Mukhtara Yussuf, Abdulkareem Baba Aminu and D’Andrade.
Nigeria, ca. 50min, 2021
Edited by
Eriamiantoe Nosakhare
Back
