Richard Zeiss, Eko Echo, installation view, Lagos Biennial 2019.
Born Vienna, Austria (1970), lives and works in London, United Kingdom
EKO Echo 2019
40 paintings, varying sizes
Courtesy of the artist
The installation EKO Echo consists of 41 individual paintings of varying sizes that refer to average house prices in 40 areas of Lagos as available online plus one fictitious value calculated on the basis of the living-wage model and the local rent yield.
Artist statement
This work was originally meant as a painted PowerPoint presentation about Lagos but has taken on a life of its own due to circumstances – the circumstances being Lagos itself. As such, it refers not only to the data that went into the model, but also to the possibilities and impossibilities of its own production. When I came to Lagos, I quickly learnt what I had expected anyway – the fact that the nature of the model was on shaky ground as far as its absolute predictions were concerned, given that much of the real estate is not available online. This also leads to some unexpected rankings in terms of prices, as real-life ‘poorer’ areas may be more expensive than more affluent areas – because there may be the odd landmark property in such areas that is put online and that then inflates the average, whereas in more developed areas, the online data is more reflective of actual circumstances across all price bands. This led me to the decision not to label the individual paintings. The story is the topology of dispersion, and that should be clear from the installation. The highest and lowest values (EKO Atlantic City vs. Living Wage property) are a definite – the biggest painting to the left, and the smallest one pretty much in its centre. But in between, things become more convoluted and fuzzier.
