re:constrictions






Stills from re:constrictions (2025)
single channel video
color hd
6 minutes 37 seconds

 
In 1977, the Odum, now a largely forgotten festival, took place in Rivers State, Nigeria, as a satellite event of FESTAC. The history of the festival is linked to the experience of two Okrika fisherpeople who witnessed the dance of boa constrictors in the river and translated the encounter into a mechanical reconstruction: a littoral masquerade belonging to both land and water.

In re:constrictions, the boa is enmeshed in the identities of the river, and the work speculates on the sketches, plans, and tracings made by those founding fisher-architects as they sought to disentangle and re-present an untranslatable experience. re:constrictions proposes an approach to reading the archive as a reconstructive exercise, shaped by obliquities, mismatched traces, and obscured memory.

re:constrictions has screened publicly in Lagos, Nigeria, at the Lagos Pop Up Museum and Post Memory, Post Archive, collaboratively programmed by Goethe-Institut Nigeria and the Nigerian Film Corporation.


Watch here.