Olalekan Jeyifous | ANARCHONAUTS [2125]

Press Preview: Friday, May 29 | 5:00-7 PM
Opening Reception: Friday, May 29 | 7:00-10 PM  

SUMMARY

It is 2125 A.D and Lagos, Nigeria is the most populous city in the world. Home to roughly 110 million inhabitants, it is a crowded and labyrinthine web of human ingenuity, frenetic and informal enterprise and the only city on earth that upholds a flourishing ideological system of governance known as the Chaordic-Anarco Technocracy. The system, otherwise known as CHAT, intentionally invokes the early online messaging services that pre-dominated global communication before the turn of the twentieth century and is a maturation of the best of the ordered chaos that defined the local culture and economy of some of Lagos’ busiest urban markets before its “rebirth”.

CHAT emerged on the heels of a global epidemic of institutional collapse that manifested locally as the ruinous outcome of a combination of explosive tensions between the rent-seeking proponents of boosterism and the erstwhile inhabitants of the largest slums in Lagos, as well as impending environmental threats to the megalopolis, and the impact of the foreign plunder of resources and raw materials vastly out-pacing the promise of investment and equitable development. Inevitably, the conclusive failure of the prevailing western infrastructures made way for the emergence of more mutable systems.

People called the advent of CHAT an “Abiku Phenomenon”, referring to the Yoruba belief of the child-spirit ensnared in an endless cycle of living, dying, and being reborn, a belief repurposed as an apt metaphor for the cycle of social and political upheavals that defined Nigeria’s trajectory in the years following its independence, and now referred to the preponderance of the formerly dispossessed and their sprawling “Shanty Mega-Structures” [ SMS Units].

SMS Units, defined by their large cylindrical, steel-framed bulbs of housing and civic spaces, now hover above the modest earthbound concrete apartment blocks that were so indicative of postwar “modernization” campaigns in many of the colonial sub-Saharan cities. Each bulb, housing multiple levels of smaller ad-hoc settlements that connect to one another by twisting skyways and cable cars, exists as an architectural avatar for the CHAT system in their enduring malleability. Now, in the wake of the dwindling presence of multinational corporations in the oil and gas industries, foreign investors, venture capitalists, and all of the attendant operatives that facilitated their dominion, this complex yet fluid network of social, political and architectural collaboration and competition emerged to form nebulously prescribed “districts” inhabited by an emergent technocratic class of citizenry, commonly referred to as Anarchonauts.

The Anarchonauts are the resilient and the resourceful, the savvy salvage experts, the ad-hoc alchemists, and the preternatural populace, creatively adept at sourcing the material fragments and detritus of global capitalism and forging them into homegrown advancements in water-filtration, medicine, education, waste-reuse, and energy. As global scarcity abounds, it is the ingenuity of the Anarchonauts piloting this autocatalytic and adaptive socio-economic apparatus that envisions a sustainable future which reconciles technology with culture and the environment.

SELECTED WORKS

.

FEATURED ARTIST

Olalekan Jeyifous (b.1977) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose multidisciplinary design practice explores notions of place, positioning the concept as continuously constructed rather than given or imagined. Using “borrowed or invented narratives,” Jeyifous examines architecture’s relationship to community and environment through speculative inquiries that raise critical questions and elicit new channels of dialogue. His work spans a diverse range of media, including hand-drawn sketches, technical illustrations, photomontage, animation, sculpture, and virtual reality experiences.

He has exhibited at venues which include the Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

In addition to his extensive exhibition history, he creates large-scale artwork for public spaces such as an award-winning installation for the Durham SmArt Vision Plan in Durham, NC, a 50ft-tall sculpture for the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and was recently awarded the inaugural commission for the Shirley Chisholm monument in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, along with fellow designer, and Cornell Alumna, Amanda Williams.