Vol. 0002
Memory Physics 

MEMORY PHYSICS [1]

OLUKEMI LIJADU on PRECIOUS OKOYOMON

Who are you and whom do you love?


Okoyomon thrusts us into a vortex of beholding. In a Lagos room, one-on-one with each initial stranger - Okoyomon is witness and questioning. Standing in the NIGERIA IMAGINARY - I am a witness to the artists' pursuit. Sensors are alert to the movement of bodies that, in turn, affect the sound of Okoyomon's field recordings of wind and music that splinter the interviews. The tower they have built escapes its usual function as a mere transmitter, it reacts and is alive to our bodies in the room: the tower is my witness. Okoyomon echoes Christina Sharpes' contention that blackness is the weather to suggest our corporeality, our movement in space as weather[ 2].

The life force of this sonic-dream monument is its lean, resilient witchweed, indigenous to Benin City, Nigeria, that climbs and will continue to make its way up the structure for the duration of the NIGERIA IMAGINARY. This thin, graceful plant laced Okoyomon's grandfather's compound in Ubiaja, and soon it will engulf the tower. The plant, commonly designated as parasitic, will rise slowly but surely to majestic heights. Okoyomon's work forces us to reckon with the designation of parasiticas arbitrary; "It depends on the place it survives in. It's about framing." How then do we designate humankind? The witchweed slowly frames a collective memory pro

ject, a dream project of sorts.


"IT IS A LOCATIONAL BEAM TO ME, TO COLLECT, RECORD AND REMEMBER. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE THIS KIND OF LIVING SIGNAL OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY THAT IS CONTINUOUSLY BEING LISTENED TO, CONTINUALLY STORING THIS DARK MATTER OF MEMORY, MUSIC, SOUND?

MY DREAM IS TO KEEP ADDING TO IT, IT IS LIKE THIS ENDLESS PIRATE RADIO STATION, A TRULY ENDLESS POEM."


Absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry, philosopher-dream enthusiast Carl Jung and futurist Octavia Butl

er all collapse into Okoyomon's contemplation of extinction, remembrance, impermanence and beauty. Okoyomon considers the miraculous power of bearing witness, not solely as an act of observation, but as the power to create. If dreams inform reality then through multiplying and echoing their acts of beholding, Okoyomon creates a reverberating archive with the potential to open innumerable temporalities.


When contemplating these songs of vulnerability, I find myself doing what Okoyomon does in their work over and over again: making space for self-fragilisation and its enormous, counterintuitive and surprising world-bui

lding capacity.


Perhaps this tower could be found amongst the artist's unfolding answers to these questions they ask: this tower and this archive will stretch into oblivion when all else is gone. At a time when all that will be left are weeds and whispers of wind and memory, a soft lullaby affirms that Okoyomon was a witness and transformed all the material around them into witnesses too.


“TWELVE QUESTIONS”:

A POEM by BHANU KAPIL

TWELVE QUESTIONS: A POEM by BHANU KAPIL

Who are you and whom do you love?

Where did you come from/how did you arrive?

How will you begin?

How will you live now?

What is the shape of your body?

Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

What do you remember about the earth?

What are the consequences of silence?

Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Describe a morning you woke without fear.

How will you/have you prepared) for your death?

And what would you say if you could?

[1] This is an ode to pataphysics a branch of philosophy founded by philosopher and playwright Alfred

Jarry, whom Okoyomon studied during their time at Shimer College in Chicago.During my conversation with Okoyomon they called pataphysics 'physics of the imagination.' I suggest that Okoyomon is dealing with memory physics in this work.

2] SHARPE, CHRISTINAIn the Wake: ON BLACKNESS AND BEING. Duke University Press, 2016. JSTOR, https:// doi.org/10.2307/j

.ctv1134 g6v.Accessed 29 Feb. 2024.