The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Goethe Institut

  • Berlin’s Black Box opens at Goethe-Institut

    Berlin’s Black Box opens at Goethe-Institut

    Black Box, a photography installation from Berlin, by photographer Sven Marquardt, with an installation on electronic music, will open on Friday at Goethe-Institut, Lagos.

    Black box is a photographic media installation by the Berghain Club member, Marquardt, with musical accompaniment by Marcel Dettmann, one of the most-influential proponents of contemporary techno.

    The installation, which runs till November 11, is being co-presented by Goethe-Institut Nigeria and African Artists’ Foundation (AAF).

    According to the orgainsers, “Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron.” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”, The New Yorker, 3/2014). Techno was the youth culture that united East and West in Berlin after the fall of communism in East Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, unused plots of land and buildings were ready to be filled with new life by clubs, bars, galleries, workshops and studios. Berlin became the epicenter of a new club culture which attracted international attention with clubs, and later with the Love Parade.

    “The club scene was given another boost at the beginning of the last decade. Thousands of Techno tourists were attracted into the city every weekend by cut-price European flights; a new wave of clubs like Bar 25, Watergate and the famous Berghain, and parties that never seemed to end. Artists, label operators, party organisers and promoters from all over the world moved to Berlin, constantly contributing new ideas for the city’s sound – a development that continues to this day.”

  • Goethe-Institut stages Hotspot project

    Goethe-Institut, Lagos unveiled its Hotspot Lagos project last Saturday by 7pm.
    The event, which was part of a creative cocktail organised quarterly by the Nlele Institute and Video Art Network Lagos tagged: FOTOPARTY, held at the City Hall Rooftop on Lagos Island.
    Hotspot Lagos featured a group of Nigerian, German and Brazilian artists who have selected specific sites in Lagos, which they consider iconic and deserving of visits by the public.
    The locations ranged from a distinctive neighbourhood, for example the Brazilian quarter, a factory, a picture in a museum, a record shop, a monument, a highly personal memory to an artist’s studio. The whole city becomes an open studio in this way and each object is literally site-specific.
    These images are not altered, nor are they ferried from one point to another. They themselves are the exhibit and must be experienced in situ. There is no dictate from institutions, no constraints of exhibition architecture, no insurmountable transport logistics; even the budget is quite modest.

  • Benjay: Tributes as the phenom clocks 80

    Benjay: Tributes as the phenom clocks 80

    There was jazz, there was eloquence, and there were friends and well-wishers as the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA), Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), Goethe Institut, and other culture-inclined bodies appositely celebrated the 80th birthday of Benson Idonije. It was a kindred ambience of respect that pervaded the celebrations as people gathered to celebrate the former broadcaster, teacher, and writer whose nom de guerre, Benjay, once was a household name.

    The celebration lasted for four days across multiple venues including Muson Centre at Onikan, Ojez Restaurant at National Stadium, and Freedom Park, all in Lagos. The first day featured a plethora of tributes to Benjay as his former colleagues and friends in the media paid homage to him at the Muson Centre.

    Secretary General of CORA, Toyin Akinosho, delivering the opening remarks, mentioned that ‘Uncle Ben” and Cora go a long way. He narrated how Benjay, still brimming with energy after he left broadcasting, wanted to bond with young people.

    “We met at an event,” he said, adding that: “he gave us tips so we started a highlife programme, which has been a source of inspiration to many young people.”

    This comment proved to be just a tip of the iceberg as the chairman for the day, Dr. Christopher Kolade expressed his delight at being invited to chair the occasion. Of the importance of Benjay to the broadcasting community, and indeed to the country as a whole, he said: “We tend to think from all the rhetoric going around that there is much room for improvement. Benson Idonije represents a very important facet of our history – where we are coming from.”

    He also recalled that when Benjay started his career in broadcasting, his activities perplexed people who wondered who it was that troubled them with his knowledge of music. He was, Kolade said, regaling them with things which they already knew. Alas, there were many things which they did not know, and which are contained in Benjay’s books and works.

    Taking a nimble jab at administration in the country, he praised the excellence of Benjay and his colleagues while he was their boss, declaiming that if the country still had people with such commitment at the helm of affairs, then things would be better.

    In a similar manner, Dele Adetiba, another former colleague of Idonije said: “No two people could have done it like Benson Idonije. I knew he was very good, but I never knew he was that good until I started reading him in the papers. He was usually quiet, but he would become a tiger with so much firepower behind the mic.”

    Meanwhile, the celebrations continued on the second day with a number of discussions on the subject of Highlife, especially as this was an area which Benjay focused on immensely. It was chaired by Professor John Collins from the University of Ghana, Legon, who has published about 50 books, including 32 on highlife.

    He lectured extensively on the origins of highlife music as well as the growth of the musical careers of such icons as E.T. Mensah and Bobby Benson. He also noted that Afrobeat and Fela’s music were influenced by highlife. He thrilled the attendants with musical illustrations as he ambidextrously played both the mouth organ and the guitar simultaneously.

    In the same vein, another speaker and friend of Benjay, Ray Mike Nwachukwu excited the audience even further with a prepared recording which explained the deep passion and magic of highlife music with accompanying narratives, and musical clips transcending Africa.

    Chairman of Evergreen Music Studios, Femi Esho then capped the lectures on the growth of Highlife by speaking to the topic; ‘Highlife must not die’. He exemplified evergreen music as a major fighter for the cause of immortalising highlife music, while ruing the sad reality that during the celebration of Nigeria clocking a half century of independence, none of the old music maestros were invited.

    By the fourth day, the discourse had escalated to its climax. A panel consisting Femi Akintunde-Johnson, Molara Wood, Ayeni Adekunle, Osagie Alonge, and Chris Ihidero (the latter being the moderator) examined the music industry in the country and agreed to an extent that credible criticism of the music industry is now an extinct practise. This, they concluded, accounts for some of the underdevelopment in the industry.

    Rounding up the four-day celebration was a concert themed ‘A toast to grand-dad’ in which Damini Ogulu, popularly known as Burna Boy, performed alongside others to celebrate the good health of Benjay.

  • Stirring debates on sustainable future

    Stirring debates on sustainable future

    The many challenges and future implications of climate change, limited supply of fossil fuels, economic recession and global crisis are issues captured in a travelling exhibition – Post-Oil City: The history of the city’s future, at the Goethe Institut, Lagos, reports Ozolua Uhakheme, Assistant Editor (Arts)

    How will the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy affect the process of urban planning and the city? How will the use of renewable energies affect urban metabolism and the politics of sustainability and mobility? These are some of the questions being raised by organisers of a travelling art exhibition, Post-Oil City: The History of the City’s Future at the Goethe Institut, Lagos.

    After showing at Johannesburg and Accra, the exhibition organised by Germany’s Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA), Stuttgart, in cooperation with ARCH+, presented the Lagos audience with 12 panels/tables showing selected photographs and videos on the subject of the exhibition. It is a unique platform for dialogue and debate on the many challenges facing urban settlements.

    But for each question, the collection provides the ‘timeline with historical background, presentations of current projects, and discussions of the link between today’s solutions and the visions of mid-20th century modernism.’

    At a time when more than half of the world’s population is living in cities, the effects of climate change on urban life can no longer be ignored. The exhibition as well as the accompanying catalogue edited by ARCH+, present innovative projects in Asia, Africa, and America that address these urgent questions: How will the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy affect the process of urban planning and the city? How will the use of renewable energies affect urban metabolism and the politics of sustainability and mobility?

    Post-Oil City is as much about the future as it is about the past. As indicated by the exhibition’s subtitle – ‘The History of the City’s Future’ – every vision of the future is based on a vision of the past. By contrasting 11 current projects in the field of sustainable urban planning with nine from the past, the exhibition aims to show that many of today’s developments have their roots in the urban utopias of mid-20th-century modernism. Today, urban planners are returning to these concepts and adapting them to the challenges posed by climate change, a limited supply of fossil fuels, economic recession, and global systemic crisis.

    Urban planning provides a laboratory for social as well as ecological change. Some experiments discussed in ‘Post-Oil City’ are Masdar City (Abu Dhabi), Xeriton (Dubai), and the NEST project in Ethiopia. Other examples of urban experimentation featured in the exhibition modify existing structures: creating a public transportation system in Curitiba’s inner city, renaturalising New York’s High Line, and building a network of electric cars with battery switch stations in Israel. Raoul Bunschoten and his team at CHORA—a London architectural firm at the cutting edge of urban design—are currently pursuing several interactive projects giving communities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait the chance to directly experience new measures in urban design and energy production. The works of Studio Mumbai Architects demonstrate the way how a ‘slow’ architecture that roots in local traditions can be translated into the language of modern construction.

    Most of the projects are accompanied by computer animations and videoclips. The models of the Masdar Plaza and Xeritown give an idea of how sustainable urban planning in arab cities nowadays can look like. Though different in method and scope, the projects presented in ‘Post-Oil City’ all have something in common: they exemplify the combination of reason, innovation, and flexibility that we’ll need to make our cities and planet sustainable for the future.

  • A feast of arts, culture as Goethe marks 50

    A feast of arts, culture as Goethe marks 50

    For four days, Goethe Institut, Nigeria, lit up the Lagos arts landscape with various presentations — theatre to dance, music, concert and documentaries to mark its golden jubilee. The events, which were held at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, were a pot-pouri of German and Nigerian arts and culture that culminated in the Lagos Live Arts Festival.

    Goethe Institut started in Lagos, Nigeria in August 1962.

    Its Director, Marc-Andre Schmachtel said the journey started from the German Cultural Centre’s first office on Igbosere Street, Lagos.

    “The take off, then, experienced a slow start, but steadily increased its cultural activities,” he recalled.

    This year marked a milestone in the centre’s cultural relations with Nigeria.

    The director foresees a better relation between countries and their arts and culture.

    “With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Goethe Institut, Nigeria, these relations have proven to be extremely successful and durable. Many artists from both countries have benefitted from the cultural exchanges through workshops, conferences, exhibitions, concerts, performances and many more. This policy of a two-sided dialogue remains one of the main objectives of our institution. We are a open house of culture and encourage the intercultural dialogue in its multiple dimensions, be it in language, teaching, in cultural programming or in the information exchange.

    “The idea of the Lagos Live Festival arose from those aims and gives rise to a unique platform of diverse art forms and trans-cultural exchange. Goethe Institut, Nigeria has done this for the past 50 years. We are proud to be able to look at our history and say thank you to all the contributions here and abroad that helped us along the way. We are hopeful that the next 50 years will witness an even greater exchange and dialogue between our two countries,” he said.

    The four-day feast of arts and culture featured over 30 artists from Germany, Nigeria, Cameroons and Angola. There were theatrical performances by ‘Monster Truck’, Flinn Theater, Theater im Bahnhof, Video Art Network (Lagos); dance displays by Crown Troupe of Africa, Ntoroso Odido Production by Isreal Sunday Akpan, and musical displays by Keziah Jones, Kuku and Ade Bantu, among others. The photography exhibition was also done by Andrew Esiebe and Edson Chagas.

    During the opening, a group from Germany called Monster Truck thrilled the audience with their exciting cultural food known as German sausage. The installation invites the audience, to enter one by one. Sitting on a roller seesaw, guests, including the Commissioner for Tourism and Intergovernmental Relations, Mr Disun Holloway, got a taste of German food and fairy tales.

    Another captivating side attraction was the Porongodo by Jelili Atiku (Nigeria), a performance meant for public places that raises questions over the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Focusing on the God’s refusal of Cain’s offering and criticises the callousness of man to each other, showing “how humans have created God’s cannibalistic tendencies. It focuses on the memorials of sacrifice, pains, suffering and callousness. It sets in motion the interaction of living and abstract through a construction of human abode and the presence of human body in the space. In the presentation, bones stand as a metaphorical statement of destruction and degeneration.

    Is there a relationship between humour and the act of kissing? Kissin’ in Yoruba–Movie, a standup comedy by Theater im Bahnhof showed there is a connection between humour and the act. The work revealed unseen aspects of life in these different cities – kissing. It portrayed an encounter between Garfar Alau (Nigerian) and Rupert Lehofer (Austria). They showed the way Yoruba actors kiss each other in movie scenes and their Austrian counterparts kiss. They explored the possibility of developing a standup comedy show for both continents. The work also researched strategies of survival for actors and portrayed the differences in economic, emotional and cultural terms aimed at offering a glimpse to the political questions that existed among those situations and circumstances.

    According to the festival curators, Mr Martin Baasch and Mr Oyindamola Fakeye, the festival focuses on younger generation of artists with the mind if developing the art. ‘’Lagos live is firstly a live art festival. However, it quickly became apparent that it would also be a platform for networking, with artists from Germany spending time researching and creating works in Nigeria and Nigerian artists undertaking the same in Germany. Focusing on the younger generation of artists, this was an opportunity to develop their working practice through the production of new works and furthering already developed pieces.

    “Collaborations were birthed and have blossomed; misunderstandings guided us through the days and produced mostly humorous situations. This two-way exchange clearly had an impact not only on the artist but also on us as curators. Lagos live festival is by no means a complete representative overview of the Nigerian art scene. Instead, it is an excerpt , a snapshot of forms, practices and questions that contemporary artists in Lagos are faced with on a daily basis, a starting point, a process, a format to set off a dialogue we believe will outlive the festival,” they said.