Vida Madighi-Oghu

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Tailoring Epistemology’s Touch Points

I am interested in the relationship between a story and how it’s told. My practice is concerned with a research-first approach using storytelling to create an arena for the tools of epistemology that underwent erasure to have discourse.

At the pinnacle of my research is Walter Mignolo’s teaching on decolonial praxis and ideas around epistemic disobedience and boarder-thinking, in conjunction with Johnathan Chimakonam’s concept of conversational philosophy. Conversationalism offered the theoretic methodology, while boarder-thinking framed the why. My practice became primarily engaged with inserting the theoretic content into the physical and visual art objects. I adopted this approach from studying the use of symbolism and storytelling in the textiles, architecture, bronze, ivory and wooden sculptures made by the Ife, Igbo, Yoruba, Iwhnuruọhna nations and the Edo-speaking peoples of the Benin Kingdom. From them, I learned to see language as a medium, viewing its relationship to a story the same way as paint is to canvas. I use Nsibidi as my primary language medium. Nsibidi is an ideographic written language system used largely by the Ekoi, Efik, Igbo, Ibibio people and Ekpe men’s society all along the Cross River area of Nigeria. Nsibidi found a body in ceramic play, and fabric became their settings.

I use colour as a visual tool on fabric. Colour began as being a way to see light and extended to a way to see invisible movements as a whole. Colour became means to physically track the movement of translation. Colour mapped how the language world shifts, vibrates and changes as language is translated and as it is made tangible. This illustration of the act of translating became critical when wrestling with ideas behind access and in access to the language. Being something that has undergone a degree of epistemicide, there is now little access to speakers and practitioners. Broader thinking aided in my use of nsibidi and the stories I wrote. I queried the necessity of access to this lost knowledge. How much had been made known to all? How much of translation needs to be exposed to the viewer, and how much must be conserved to preserve the fragility of language?

I play with collaging materials, folding fabric into hip ties and gele head wraps, printing and

spray painting fabric and sculpting with unglazed red clay. Each material carries a symbolic story and engages with creative discourse through their curation that ultimately tell a story about erasure, epistemology and Afrocentric thinking. Translation rises through conversations in the material touch points. Epistemology is made in the many interactions of the erased and the subjugation.