A decade after Jumoke Sanwo set up the Revolving Art Incubator at Silverbird Galleria in Lagos, RAI is using its 10th anniversary to revisit the people, places and ideas that have passed through it. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports
By any reckoning, a 10th anniversary gives an institution enough reason to pat itself on the back. So it is hardly surprising that the Revolving Art Incubator, usually abbreviated to RAI, is doing a little of that as it marks the occasion.
Its six-month programme, Afterlives/AfterSpaces, runs from June through December. It opened in June with its launch and InstaLive conversations. July brought In Memoriam, a series of archive installations devoted to artists and cultural figures whose work continues to resonate. August brings urban interventions across Lagos, followed in September by the Maker Lab exhibition, symposium and anniversary event. A film programme and Storytelling Lab hold in October, a retrospective exhibition in November, and the final activation and outSPOKEN in December.
Since Jumoke Sanwo, a self-taught lens-based artist and cultural interlocutor, founded RAI in 2016 at Silverbird Galleria in Victoria Island, it has never fitted neatly into the conventional gallery model. Her idea was to establish a place where artists could experiment and where architects, designers, filmmakers, technologists, writers and researchers could work alongside one another. Contemporary art, in her view, did not have to remain behind gallery walls.
Ten years on, Sanwo is already looking beyond the anniversary. “For 10 years, RAI has been cultivating spaces for possibility, nurturing artists, ideas, materials and conversations at the intersections of memory, place and the future,” she says. RAI began, she adds, by “creating space where there was little” and has grown into a platform for activating knowledge, connecting histories and imagining new possibilities.
She is also thinking about how things are made. RAI is “cultivating new pathways between the industrial and the artisanal” and asking what can be made from “our own knowledge, materials and cultural resources”, she says.
Since its beginnings, RAI has staged more than 50 solo and group exhibitions and organised residencies, apprenticeships, workshops, conversations and collaborative projects. Yet for many of those who passed through its doors, the exhibitions were only part of the attraction.
Lagos-based visual artist and poet Victor Ehikhamenor remembers the programming as “well curated”, from exhibitions to artist talks. But he also remembers the building itself. It was not a white cube, and finding one’s way around it could be an adventure. Its labyrinthine character was part of its appeal. “Each exhibition there portends something greater to come,” he says.
Dr Damola Adebowale of Asiri Magazine remembers RAI in similarly warm terms. It was, he says, “a necessary intervention” when it entered the art scene and, ten years later, continues to provide the “necessary nutrients” for conversation and creative exchange. Its projects, he believes, have helped produce new thinkers. “It’s been a pleasure to be part of this journey,” he says. “RAI till the wheels fall off.”
William Moore, another Lagos-based artist, writer and poet, puts it more simply: “RAI was really a place that held a space nowhere else could have.”
Much of the anniversary programme returns to subjects RAI has dealt with over the years. Technology, architecture, filmmaking, curating and cultural production have all featured in its conversations. Discussions around artificial intelligence and authorship have raised questions about creativity and ownership. Ojà l’Àyé, Ayé l’Ojà drew on Yoruba philosophy to consider the marketplace as a place of knowledge, negotiation and collective memory. Other sessions have dealt with architecture, public monuments and the cities people inherit and continue to alter.
Cinema has had its place too, particularly as a way of recording history and probing the uneasy territory between fact, memory and imagination.
The memorial strand of Afterlives looks at people whose work continues to circulate through the culture. One event paid tribute to photographer, filmmaker and cultural historian Tam Fiofori. Friends, collaborators and former protégés recalled his work and his willingness to share what he knew. In Fiofori’s case, the photographs and films are only part of the story. There are also the people who took something from him and carried it elsewhere.
Questions of inheritance surface elsewhere in the programme. Some conversations deal with embodied memory and artistic stewardship. Others consider what becomes of an artist’s work after death, when later generations encounter it through scholarship, conservation, performance and reinterpretation.
RAI’s interest in production is reflected in the Material Futures Maker Incubator. Launched in August, it brought together Lagos-based artists, architects, designers, makers and cultural thinkers around the idea of “The Sandal of the Future”. An ordinary object associated with movement became a starting point for thinking about materials, indigenous knowledge, design and technology.
From September 4 to 18, the selected participants will work with artists, designers, entrepreneurs and industry specialists in Innovation Management, Business Development and Product Prototype Development. Some of the ideas are expected to emerge as exhibition-ready prototypes.
The anniversary programme will take RAI outside its familiar setting as well. Markets, neighbourhoods, transport corridors and informal commercial spaces will become sites for artistic interventions. The approach relates to Sanwo’s idea of “Global Localisation”, or “Glocal”: engaging with the wider world without discarding local histories, indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions.
The idea has informed exhibitions such as Visual Representations: Past and Present, Power Show II: The God-Fathers Are Not to Blame, Four Women, Salvage, Artist-at-Work, Art + Virtual Reality, No Condition Is Permanent and The Black Wall Experiment. It has also found expression in initiatives including OUTSPOKEN, Animate Old Lagos and the RAI Apprenticeship Programme.
For the anniversary, RAI is assembling photographs, documents, recordings and recollections for a compendium and documentary. The archive is intended to preserve the record of what the organisation did, as well as the memories of those who encountered it.
In 2019, The New York Times described RAI as one of Lagos’ sharpest artist-led spaces. Ten years later, the people who kept returning, the collaborations that survived individual projects and the memories of that awkward, labyrinthine building at Silverbird Galleria may say more about RAI than any anniversary slogan could.
The building is no longer the point. What happened there is. An artist carried something from a RAI project into another work. A conversation led, eventually, to another collaboration. Someone encountered a practice or an idea there and remembered it long after the exhibition had closed. Those are part of what RAI has left behind.