What lies beneath these student’s present memory of current events? What memories are being erased by the news reports being written about them?

It was with these questions that I went back to a school I had visited before. Shehu Sanda Kyarimi government school of about 2800 students in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria. On March 18, 2013 six Boko Haram gunmen entered the school killing and injuring students. That was what the article I had written said.

I engaged about ten girls to collaborate on an improvisational series. I was looking for natural gestures, expressions, and movement, something beyond the coldness of the frame and beyond the framework of a story. What stories, folktales, fairytales did they remember being told as little children? What games were passed to them in the playgrounds?

Tatsuniya for me is “Warmth work” in a Beauysian sense, where through our collaborations and interrelationships new narratives are formed and a tangible warmth “sculpture” is made from our interconnectedness.

It’s a shifting exploration of the spatial relationships between our gazes and an exercise in excavation, preservation and improvisation. Where would we go? What would we do together?

Tatsuniya is a conceptual continuation of the Education is forbidden project.

- Tatsuniya, 2017 - ongoing
Still images, video, installation

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