LagosPhoto20 set for Rapid Response Restitution

This year, the LagosPhoto will hold its first virtual show in Nigeria. It is dedicated to Home Museum, where individual can send pictures from their homes to be exhibited. Dubbed, LagosPhoto20 Rapid Response Restitution, the festival is not limited to professional artists, but seeks to inject the attitude of preserving items of importance in Nigerians.

Curated by Dr. Oluwatoyin Sogbesan, the virtual festival is a project where all participants are to submit objects of virtue as personal collection to the organisers.

Organised by the African Artists Foundation (AAF), the festival will hold online with the aim of restoring lost memories and evoking interest in our shared history.

According to the Director, LagosPhoto, Azu Nwagbogu, the idea is for individual to shine their eyes on their homes as if they were museums, take pictures of objects and send for the show.

Nwagbogu said, “as we go about our busy lives, we often forget the small things worth preserving, what we call objects of virtue, object that are important to each person, family and home. Some treasures we use every day, some we keep, some we hold close, some we lose and some are simply forgotten and not preserved at all. For example, a watch passed down from a father to his child, an Ibeji doll, a piece of woven cloth from our grandmother, an old photograph or newspaper cut-out, a souvenir from the last city we visited, or a medal won at a sports competition. All these evoke memories and tell stories about our culture and history in ways we don’t always recognise.

“During LagosPhoto20, your own Home Museum will be exhibited online. With this rapid response, we hope to hold onto these valuable artefacts for the benefit of future generations and begin conversations about our collective histories.

Sogbesan said, “from each home, you have collection passed down from generation to generation, grandparents to the parents, and for every family, these objects tell a different story and a different meaning to restitution.

“So, what we have done is that, we’ve decided to allow everybody through inclusive participation by having all these various languages — Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba even in the diaspora; Africans in the diaspora, anybody who is connected one way or the other with these objects or objects within their home and who is willing to participate and share, co-creation, we can create new digital platform where we showcase our heritage to encourage everyone to digital artefact. How do you do that? By using your camera phone, look into your home as if they are museums and look at those objects and cloud your thoughts.

“We are looking into our homes and take photograph of our homes and send them to Lagos Photo where it will be published these photos as a lager connection and bigger conversation at the end of the day.

“We invite everyone to take part in building this new virtual museum,” he said.