Go Back to Get It

  • February 2020

The Black body in America is subjected to not only explicit violence, but also structural violence precipitated from discriminatory housing policies, education, and political disenfranchisement. The violence is inscribed onto and into the bodies of the oppressed resulting in higher rates than whites for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and homicide.[1]

How do we deal with the deeply embedded cultural trauma. How do we turn shame induced by indignities into pride. How do we move from debtors of a recalcitrant state to deserved creditors. These are some of the questions I have been asking myself for a few years, and has been the focus of my artistic work.

Speculative Landscaping

  • February 2020

The "land" is in us in ways seen and unseen. From the food we consume, to the landmarks we orient to, "the land" marks us and becomes our DNA. We in return make the land, ontologically, through "relations between things",[1] through socio-political and legal infrastructures that facilitates the partition and extraction of their value.

In Brownsville, a predominantly African American area of Brooklyn (considered one of the most "dangerous" neighborhoods in New York"[2], America's Food Basket is one of a handfull of places where one may procure fresh produce. I found myself living in Brownsville in 2017, through what I have now come to know as a discriminatory renting practice, a kin to redlining.[3] I walked many blocks, tempted by a plethora of fast food joints, bodegas, and delis that I knew through experience did not carry fresh vegetables. On my way back from the "food basket", careful not to burden myself with the weight of too many provisions, I regularly contemplated building my own garden.

Iyapo Repository: Constructing and Archiving Alternate Futures

  • November 2019

Published in Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement.

Iyapo Repository is a resource library, created by Ayodamola Okunseinde and Salome Asega, that houses a collection of digital and physical artifacts created to affirm and project the future of people of African descent.

This chapter describes the genesis of the repository, its development at the Eyebeam residency, and lessons gleaned from various repository workshops and exhibitions. Additionally the chapter looks at workshop and prototype methods utilized to create the repository.

It is hoped this chapter would serve as inspiration for envisioning alternate futures and its methods used as tools for healing and catharsis.

disgust. desire. design

  • August 2019

Co-Author Teresa Braun

disgust. desire. design is a collection of anthropological experiments created by sacra collective on the nature of disgust and desire through the lens of design. The works seek to investigate the roles our olfactory and gustatory perceptions play in generating feelings of desire and disgust. Additionally, we seek to query what connections, if any, exist between desire and disgust.

sacra collective is a performance duo (Teresa Braun and Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde) that explores the manifestation of “the sacred” in private and public spaces. sacra creates techno-shamanistic, interactive rituals that facilitate transformation within participants by challenging notions of self in a socio-political context, problematizing ideas of belonging, and questioning belief systems.