Remi is a London based spatial practitioner and researcher, currently exploring the intersections between the politics of race, coloniality, cartography, performance, and more-than-human metabolism.
His thesis project Water No Get Enemy: Counter-Cartographies of Diaspora aims to develop a model of resistance to neo-colonial practices of crude oil extraction and ecocide in the Niger Delta. By learning from indigenous epistemologies archived in Nigerian masquerade, the project proposes a new masquerade: a method of cartography that critiques harmful extractive practices by bringing multiple diasporic sites into dialogue through performance.
Remi Kuforiji’s Reading and Watching List:
Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the invasion by Europeans during the late 19th century.
Parable of the Sower is a 1993 science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. It is an apocalypse science fiction novel that provides commentary on climate change and social inequality.
This innovative, interdisciplinary volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of the multidimensional world of the global oil and gas industry. It features an essay by Rebecca Golden Timsar titled Masculinity, and Violence Egbesu Worship in the Niger Delta of Nigeria.
Robin Horton’s The Gods as Guests: An Aspect of Kalabari Religious Life was published in 1960 in Lagos: Nigeria Magazine.
Robin Horton’s The Kalabari “Ekine” Society: A Borderland of Religion and Art was published in 1963 in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute.
The on-going insurgency in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria continues to have serious consequences for oil workers, corporations and the global oil market. In spite of the growing interest in arguably the greatest existential threat to the Nigerian state since the Civil War of 1967–70, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the Delta creeks and the fundamental roles performed by women in the insurgency. This paper by Temitope Oriola interrogates the space represented by the creeks as the home territory of insurgents in Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta.
The Last Angel of History is a 45-minute documentary, directed in 1996 by John Akomfrah and written and researched by Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective, that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots. The film is a hybrid documentary and fictional narrative. Documentary segments include traditional talking-head clips from musicians, writers, and social critics, as well as archival video footage and photographs.
Finding Fanon Trilogy is a series of works by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy; inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.
In the films, the two artists negotiate Fanon’s ideas, examining the politics of race, racism and the post-colonial, and how these societal issues affect their relationship.
