“A Walk” is a psycho-geographical survey that visually maps an interior cartography from the external environment that I traverse.  “A Walk” is a narrative mechanism that is mobile and open-ended, with no beginning, middle or end, that yields stills, moving images and an assemblage of found objects I sculpt together from objects I pick up on my “path”. Found things could be sound, it could be video, it could be torn photographs, discarded material, a stick or a leaf.

As I walked in Maiduguri, Lagos and Abuja I saw my body as a porous gathering tool where all sorts of multi-sensory information could be gathered. During walks in Millennium park, Abuja, I began finding torn up photos of visitors barely visible left in the grass. And so, we began to cross-pollinate to produce the photo-collages in this series.

“A Walk” charts my experience with the urban environment that surrounds me. With each step posing questions about the experience of a gendered body and mobility in urban areas, and the growth ways of flora as it is influenced by the urban environment.  "A Walk" is banal everyday routine and also resistance “to the spatial consequences of a masculinist society” through what Gillian Rose describes in the book Feminism and Geography: The limits of geographical knowledge.

By walking slowly and breathing in copious amounts of fresh air, I had an intention to sprout roots, to ground and earth myself to an environment I felt somehow orphaned from after long stints away. I wanted to graft to the land.

I also began to ideate “walking” as narrative, when I began research about the rising incident of female suicide bombers in North eastern Nigeria. I felt a void in linear photographic language to capture these horrific incidents. Walking became “Response-ability” in a Beausyian sense.
 
A “Walk” is an intersection of many moving ideas, but what remains constant in my mind is the question of how to mend a rupture, stitch a gash, and put the pieces back together of something, perhaps a body, fragmented in the landscape.

2018 - In progress.
Photographs, collages, sound, video, sculpture
The project was supported by an Open Society Foundation Moving Walls grant.