Selected Artists 2020

Despite the global COVID-19 pandemic, Goethe-Institut Nigeria is pleased to implement the residency programme 2020 together with its partner organisations. 

2020 has recently shown us that some obvious things suddenly become impossible: Since end of March 2020, all international airports are closed and the continuously increasing number of new infections does not recede, so Goethe-Institut Nigeria and its Nigerian and German partner institutions could not assume whether this year's residency titled "On Archives", could eventually take part.
 
We are relieved that we jointly found a solution: The Nigerian artists Afopefoluwa Ojo, currently working in the Netherlands, will stay in Berlin from beginning of September till end of November. Our Berlin project partners Center for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U) in Berlin, the cultural office of local government Berlin Mitte and SAVVY Contemporary Art Space will introduce her to the Berlin art and culture scene.


© AO Afopefoluwa Ojo is a writer and creative technologist from Lagos who currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Afopefoluwa’s work seeks to explore themes of otherness, spirituality, multiplicity, and memory, experiments with form, language, the lyrical, and the mundane.

"Berlin is one of the most exciting cities. I am excited to enter into a space of innovation between two of the most exciting cities right now - Lagos and Berlin - cities bubbling on the edge of artistic expression. My work during this residency is to innovate the archive as a poem and as a future tool using future technology; to create a format of archiving where everybody becomes both active subject and object. Through this process of creating and learning, I hope to work together with amazing institutions like Goethe Institut, Savvy Contemporary, ZK/U, Galerie Wedding, and 16/16 to reimagine the possibilities of archiving and I expect to have a lot of fun in the process of interacting with the archive as a major part of our quotidian experience and also questioning in what ways it can be presented visually, artistically, sonically, technically, or otherwise."
(Afopefoluwa Ojo)
 
From middle of September till End of October, the Berlin-based artist Monaí de Paulo Antunes will take part in a digital residency in Lagos. She is going to work closely together with our Nigerian partner 16/16.

© Niko de Paula Lefort Monaí de Paula Antunes is an artistic researcher interested on complexity and communication together with their material, spatial and political entanglements. She studied Visual Communication and Arts and Media, specialising in Time-based Media, Generative Art and Development of Spatial Systems, all at the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has participated in many collaborative projects, specially Arts & Sciences collaborations, developing alternative transdisciplinary models for the articulation, research and display of complex phenomena.
 
"By reimagining this residency at 16by16 under the new remote circumstances, it became evident how even more important the public program and community based aspect of this project is, in order to be able to fully implement it. Therefore, the first steps and groundwork of the residency are awakening people’s interest and involvement revolving radio-making and gardening by offering lectures, workshops and talks in order to share and exchange knowledge.
Together with the collective and hands on setup of the communal garden at Plan B, we shall put together a database of stories, sounds, testimonies, knowledge on household level food production, native plants, urban gardening, seeds, fermentation… memories, dreams and much more from the vast universe of aurality, specially when in connection to ecology. The final stage of the residency will be dedicated to the archiving experiments using digital technologies and experimental radio formats. It should generate a solid infrastructure for a long lasting and ever growing community radio and dynamic sound archive, offering the means for replication by other radio and archive enthusiasts."