Aderemi Adegbite is the Artistic Director of the yearly community-based international art festival, Iwaya Community Art Festival (ICAF). The event seeks to promote alternative art and artists, bringing the former closer to the people. In this interview with FOYEKE AJAO, Adegbite speaks on the festival’s radical approach and its impact on Iwaya Community.
What sets Iwaya Community Art Festival (ICAF) apart from other festivals?
It is a community-based international art festival that runs on very organic ideas. At the poetry session of last year’s festival, the audience sat under a tree with mats while the artists sat on stools. And we went out of the community – to Tejuosho market in Yaba – for the performance of Yusuf Durodola’s play, titled: Agbegilere. Taiwo Aiyedogbon painted human figures on the street.
The festival is not limited by space, we just want to engage everyday people on the streets and we believe these settings open up the arts to a wider audience, especially petty traders, who hawk on the streets and market men and women, who are typically not involved in the discourse on contemporary arts.
We call for submissions of work and for residency from local and international artists.
What inspired the starting the ICAF?
I was prompted by a sense of commitment. I was born and bred in Iwaya community and ran an organisation that focuses on creating art projects that are both didactic and artistic within the community. I like to say that this festival is my personal artistic Corporate Social Responsibility to the community. Art in Lagos and Nigeria, in general, is restricted to the galleries and museums, making it very elitist and sometimes very academic. In Nigeria, community festivals that are visual arts-oriented and focus on contemporary art are rare.
Rather than recycling the regular audience at visual arts openings and shows, the idea behind the ICAF was to reach a new audience through a contemporary community festival that was visual arts-oriented. The festival is focused on bringing art closer to people who cannot actually afford it.
It’s important to bring art to low income earners who cannot afford to visit the galleries and museums. Art should not be limited to a particular set of people or space. It’s so sad that art writers would rather review organised exhibitions but will not attend community festivals in Lagos and other states except it’s organised by the government or a corporate organisation. They cannot go through the rigour of covering this type of festival. How are we going to win new audiences when we continue to recycle audiences and meet the same people at gallery exhibitions?
How do you go about bringing art closer to the people, and ensure that art spaces are accessible to all?
The festival is meant to present art in the community in unusual spaces because the usual spaces, which would have suited the purpose are non-existent within the community. And so, we are constantly looking for alternative spaces to transform into art spaces with the works we installed within them. And we are happy to say we have done several since the festival began in 2016.
We have put up some images of Bariga-based boxers (shot by Kayode Oluwa) in a very iconic space where a lot of street boys love to sit. That spot is like the political signpost of the community where you find lots of campaign posters; and because we are in the political season, there were lots of posters there representing different political parties.
There was also a long wall close to the headquarters of Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (MFM), where we decided to install Congolese artist, Georges Senga’s work about a particular religious community in Congo. The work focuses on Simon Kimbangu, the founder of Malemba religious community, who claims to be the first black prophet in Africa. Kimbangu of Nkamba, DR Congo was jailed by the Belgian colonial authority for more than 30 years before he died in prison in October 1951.
In this work, Georges Senga recounts his childhood memory of Kimbanguists through still images. Members of the Malemba sect have their own rituals and processes, but they dress like members of the white garment churches in Nigeria. While we were mounting those images, most passers-by who worshipped at MFM were curious to know what the photographs were about and why we had decided to mount them close to their church. The MFM members would not have approached us if we were putting up a tutorial centre banner similar to those that littered the wall, but they had that conversation with us because we were putting up photographs of what looked like another Christian sect. For them, what they saw was a rival congregation and they had to react to it immediately.
Another alternative space that was maximally explored included some walls built in 2016, by a family that closed a major street entrance road to a sectional area of the community. Kris Russo in collaboration with residents of the community whose lifestyles were affected by the walls, co-created an open-space, town hall intervention on Yeye Street, where series of talks were held with the affected people and the community leaders during the festival.
Did the people understand some of these works?
At first glance some did not but oftentimes they would approach us to find out more and we would explain to them. A typical example is the the wonderful work about human trafficking through the Mediterranean Sea and the dangers around it using effigies and some toys by Enoh Lienemann. The title of her photography work -“FRONT-EX A Mystery Tour”- alludes to Frontex, the name of a border control agency established by the European Union in collaboration with Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania. Frontex controls the frontiers of Mediterranean Sea in order to prevent illegal migration of Africans through European waters.
I remember we installed Enoh’s work right across from a big lottery shop in the community where at least 50 to 100 boys bet their money every day and try to hit the jackpot. To my surprise, some of the boys really understood what the installations were about because they could engage with it and talk about the risks involved in such journeys.
What are some of the challenges encountered in organising the festival?
The first challenge is funding: to run some of our projects successfully, we need funding from local and international funding platforms. Vernacular Art-space Laboratory is an artist-led organisation with different community projects one of which is Communal Re-Imagination, an alternative art school project funded by the Prince Claus Fund. This aim of this project is to re-engage youth in the Iwaya/Makoko community through art workshops for a year without any financial commitment from the participants. We have not been able to gain such funding for Iwaya Community Art Festival, which is in its fourth year. We always have calls for submissions: for work and for residency. We run an international community art festival and apart from reaching out to local artists, we also reach out to international artists for submissions through art platforms. It’s very important for us to continue to engage with and encourage conversations between Anglophone and Francophone countries. In 2017, we invited Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi also known as Crazinist Artist from Ghana, Youchaou Kiffouly from Republic of Benin and Gor Soudan From Kenya. Last year we were able to get one artist from Mali that was supported by Art Moves Africa (AMA) travel grant. We tried to get two of them but only one got the funding.
The second challenge is the thugs who are out to tax us for every space used. We also have people accosting us and trying to stop what we are doing, but we just find a way of engaging them. At Tejuosho Market, where we had a performance – even though we were on the walkway outside the market – a task force, led by a woman, came and asked us to take our things away from the walkway that is located outside the market complex. They shouted and threatened to arrest us, so I spoke with the commander and told her that we were not about to do anything cunning or diabolical. Rather, we were artists and she should be calm and see what we were about to offer.
How has the experience been and is it open to all artists and art forms?
It has been exciting. And yes, all artists and all art forms. 2018 was the most open year for entries. For the first time in the history of ICAF Lagos, all the projects done by the artists-in-residence were community-based. Unlike two years ago where some artists already brought their work, all the works exhibited at last year’s festival were inspired by the community, created within the community and exhibited within the community, which is what we want from the festival. For me, as the Artistic Director of the festival, it shows that the residency programme is working and that the festival is meeting its objectives.
The way we mount photographic works during the festival is strategic. In 2016, we focused on photography and video art because of our limited resources. In 2017, we adopted a similar process, but unlike in 2016, we had exclusive access to an abandoned space directly opposite the community market – an uncompleted building – that we used as an installation space. It was very important for us to use this space as part of that year’s festival.
We didn’t have access to the building in 2018 the way we did in 2017, we only had a floor to ourselves and we put an artist on that floor. Nameer Davis, an Australian artist, collaborated with school kids to paint three-dimensional life size pictures directly on the pillars of the building, giving it a sculptural feel. Nameer’s work was indeed, sophisticated for the festival and I sincerely think it is something that should be shown in a biennale.
We were able to accommodate all art forms last year, thanks to the Communal Re-Imagination Workstation funded by Prince Claus Fund as part of its Next Generation Project. The space we have is not big enough to accommodate every artist at the festival – its proximity is also a factor – so we need other alternative spaces within the community.
In 2019, we will not have the uncompleted building at Iwaya market anymore, and if there are no alternatives, such as open spaces and uncompleted buildings, we might consider negotiating to put works in people’s compounds and their homes.
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