Critical (Con)fabulations: Freewriting workshop with Sarah Lee and Tokini Fubara

Critical (Con)fabulations: Freewriting workshop with Sarah Lee and Tokini Fubara

Exploring the Lost Species Day theme of ecological loss, this freewriting workshop will be a space for re-membering. Participants are encouraged to bring a totem/object that symbolises a dis/connection from their ecological surroundings (e.g. a feather, a blade of grass, a photo etc). Prompted with excerpts from writers such as Ken Saro Wiwa, Edouard Glissant and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we will confabulate stories about our totems and connect experiences of disappearing ecologies.

This creative session forms part of Tokini Fubara's exhibition programme, ibi minji faari. It will be facilitated by Sarah Naomi Lee.

About ibi minji faari

Slowly, quietly, the Niger Delta is being mauled beyond repair.…And the Niger Delta is the world.

— Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where vultures feast

ibi minji faari (translated from Kalabari Ijo: "the good water is going away") is an exploration of the riverine landscapes of the oil-producing region of Nigeria—the Niger Delta. Formed with numerous creeks and rivers leading into the Atlantic Ocean, the Niger Delta is ecologically significant as the third largest mangrove forest in the world. It also has global significance as a zone of extraction—notably for the historic extraction of humans during the transatlantic slave trade, the extraction of palm oil during British colonisation, and the current extraction of crude oil from multinational petroleum companies such as Shell-BP.

Centuries of extraction from this region has contributed to loss of land and people—such as that of the Ogoniland and its people—and a loss of connection to the water. ibi minji faari builds on Tokini’sprevious works on race, space, and borders, turning to the creeks surrounding their place of origin in Port Harcourt city. Using time-based work, this exhibition deploys a poetics of landscape in search of good waters.

This exhibition and event are supported by the University of Sussex through its Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account grant.

ibi minji faari runs at ONCA from 30 November to 13 December, 2024.

Cover image is by Jerry Chidi accessed through Climate Visuals.

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