Dele Adeyemo

Born Kaduna, Nigeria (1985), lives and works in London, United Kingdom and Lagos, Nigeria

Black Horizon 2019
Video, live performance
Courtesy of the artist

Black Horizon is a collaborative film project and dance production between Dele Adeyemo (editing), Hermes Chibueze Iyele (Choreography), and Sunday ‘Valu’ Obiajulu (Community engagement) made in Oworonshoki, Lagos. The presentation of the project at the 2019 Lagos Biennial consisted of a screening of Black Horizon, featuring the solitary figure of Hermes Iyele, dancing in his late father’s suit, as well as a live performance of a group of dancers led by Iyele. The screening and performance took place at both the Biennial location of Freedom Tower on Lagos Island and in the heart of the community of Oworonshoki, Lagos.

Black Horizon contrasts the different logics of development that shape the city of Lagos. Through the film and performances, the violence of the dredging practices of the luxury real estate development of Eko Atlantic on Victoria Island is set against the practices of worlding present within a group of young creatives in the community of Oworonshoki on the edge of the megacity. The work holds in tension these different cultures of shaping space where the hegemonic scale of global capital is brought into question by the body of the dancer. Through the intimacy and vulnerability of the individual performance, as well as the collective live performance, a space of creative expression and liberation is choreographed within a site of structural neglect and ruination.

In the tradition of West African masquerade festivals, where the history of social relations that connect the community to the Earth are enacted, the performances curated by Dele Adeyemo and choreographed and performed by Hermes Iyele constitute a contemporary ritual that form a Black Horizon from which new worlds and imagined futures can emerge.