Home Museum | Lagos Photo Festival’s 11th Edition Is About A Rapid Response Restitution
This year's edition of Lagos Photo Festival examines the ramifications of restitution through an ambitious and innovative project, the Home Museum. An open call in May asked people to submit images of objects important to them and their home, resulting in more than 200 submissions.
The focal theme this year is Rapid Response Restitution, a concept developed by Lagos Photo Festival founder Azu Nwagbogu and curator Dr. Clémentine Deliss in collaboration with guest curator and Nigerian cultural historian Dr. Oluwatoyin Sogbesan. “With Rapid Response Restitution, LagosPhoto20 takes an unusual and participatory approach to current discussions on the return of Africa’s cultural heritage back to the continent,” they write. “Central to this year’s edition is the Home Museum, an inclusive digital exhibition co-created by citizens in Nigeria and internationally who are invited to produce a fast shutter retrieval of their personal and family’s cultural heritage. Through high-speed photography, fleeting moments from the past are captured, helping to restore lost memories and demonstrate that the African continent is not trapped within an endless process of waiting for its heirlooms to be returned. On the contrary, Home Museum will help to stimulate awareness of the issues around the restitution of cultural heritage in Africa.”
Eva Stenram, A 1950s woven kitchen tea towel embroidered with my mother’s maiden initials, 2020“The objects that appear in these practically empty spaces belong to the house of my grandmother who passed away 11 years ago. Every year I visit her house, which remains closed, to photograph the passage of time and create images that allow me to generate a visual memory through the objects that remain, and the space she inhabited.”
“LagosPhoto believes it is important to begin constructively sensitizing the Nigerian public to the debates on restitution and to do this online through visual thinking and the medium of photography. Here photographic sequences of diverse and sometimes unrelated objects from different collections past and future are brought into a visual conversation with one another. This process helps to remediate the absence of the original object. Remediation reflects the current COVID-19 conditions within which we live and that require both healing, restoration and transformation.”
HOME MUSEUM
Opening
7 November 2020, 5 CET
To register for the exhibition opening write to homemuseum@lagosphotofestival.com
lagosphotofestival.com
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