LAGOS SPACE PROGRAMME

Scanned studies of the garments, where detail comes forward: utility pockets, surface, stitch, Post Adire pattern and construction. Lagos Space Programme

Focus on detail. Adire jersey, tailored layers, bronze objects. Archive #lagosspaceprogramme

Our sculptural bronze bag presented as part of FTA: Threads of Impact at M7, Doha — celebrating seven years of Fashion Trust Arabia. The exhibition, unveiled by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, brings together over eighty designers whose work reflects the depth of regional craft, innovation, and cultural storytelling. @fashiontrustarabia @almayassabnthamad @m7.qatar , curator Omoyemi @omoyemiakerele , and @qatarcreates

Queer ontologies at Lagos Space Programme emerge through our research into Adire as a living queer archive, reframing inherited Yoruba visual systems. In dialogue with the subversive play of Gelede masquerades, our work contributes to a rigorous lineage of experimentation, from the Sacred art school founded at Osogbo in the early 60s to new decolonial futures of dress.

The Post Adire Lab The Prince of Wales check is a European textile code, a visual language of aristocracy, power and British tailoring. I was curious about what would happen if that code was reauthored through Yoruba hands. With my Adire team, we painstakingly drew every check and every line in cassava paste, a process rooted in Yoruba resist dyeing traditions. What is usually woven by machine in the West became, in our hands, a slow and deliberate inscription. This is not simply about fusion. It is about inheritance and disruption, taking a symbol of European authority and translating it into a Yoruba textile archive. For me, it is an act of cultural authorship, making a pattern that once spoke in the voice of empire now speak in Yoruba. #lagosspaceprogramme

Ben Enwonwu has always stood out to me as an artist who made African identity feel expansive and limitless. An Igbo modernist whose work moved between sculpture, painting and cultural diplomacy, he built a visual language that was deeply rooted in African traditions while speaking to the world on his own terms. His Negritude series in particular resonates with my research, the way he centred the Black figure with grace and dignity, elongating forms, capturing movement and allowing each body to hold history without being trapped by it. In my own practice with Lagos Space Programme, I often return to Enwonwu as a reminder that African aesthetics are not static or provincial. He showed that they can be ceremonial and modern, intimate and global, political and poetic all at once. His work affirms what I search for in Post Adire, a way of carrying memory, resistance and possibility in material form. In the LSP universe, I think of garments as he thought of his sculptures and paintings: living cultural artefacts, shaped by the past but reaching toward new and uncharted futures. This is the legacy I claim for my work, an Africa that defines itself, moves freely and imagines without limit. #lagosspaceprogramme

Yusuf Grillo’s use of colour has always been important to me. His muted blues, violets and greys carried more than just pigment. They held memory and emotion. His paintings did not compete for attention. It showed me the value of quiet confidence in visual work. That kind of restraint continues to inform my approach to design. I often think about how colour can create atmosphere. How it can communicate without being loud. Grillo’s work taught me that subtlety has power. It shaped how I use Adire in my practice. I do not approach Adire only as a textile tradition. I think of it as a living language. A system of signs and patterns that can hold personal and collective memory. In my work, I use Adire as a queer archive. It becomes a way to carry coded truths. A visual language that allows for ambiguity, emotion and intimacy. Queer expression often moves through gesture and suggestion. It resists direct translation. Adire allows for that. Its symbols can be both public and private, both known and unknown. Indigo becomes more than a dye. It becomes a container for desire, refusal and vulnerability. Like Grillo, I am drawn to quietness and emotional depth. I am interested in aesthetics that do not over-explain. That make space for complexity. #lagosspaceprogramme

Traces of Ecstasy, ICA at VCU Aerial Proposition II (Post àdìrẹ), 2024 Indigo dyed cotton, silk, vintage aṣọ òkè, cassava paste on canvas In this work I’m thinking about scale: how cloth takes up space not just physically, but spiritually, politically. The piece hangs suspended, held in tension. It feels both weightless and deeply burdened. Part of this thinking has been shaped through ongoing conversations, especially with @kj_abudu , around Yoruba material traditions and how they live on as critical, conceptual language. The work extends my exploration of àdìrẹ, a form I’ve been reworking and reframing for years, sometimes through cloth, sometimes through discourse. I use the term post àdìrẹ to describe this process. It’s a way of working within an indigenous tradition while also opening it up: formally, spiritually, structurally. I’m not trying to preserve a frozen idea of heritage. I’m engaging with it as something alive, unstable, reconfigurable. This piece was made in collaboration with women dyers in Abeokuta. Their labour and ancestral knowledge is central. I work with vintage aṣọ òkè, woven silk and cotton strips already marked by history, and bring it into dialogue with indigo dyed cloth, cassava paste resist, and cotton canvas. The surfaces are torn, folded, sometimes violently disrupted. These gestures speak to trauma, to rupture, to the brutalised surface of the postcolonial body. Curated by @kj_abudu

“Ojú tó bá rí Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ ti dé òpin ìrán.” (The eyes that have seen Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ have seen the ultimate spectacle.) Ph. David Paul Carr The Gẹlẹdẹ masquerade is a Yoruba ritual form that honours the spiritual authority of women, particularly the revered àwòn ìyá mi(Primordial Female Forces). Performed by men but in service of feminine force, it fuses satire, sculpture, costume, and movement into a sacred public ritual. In many ways, Gẹlẹdẹ resonates with my own practice. Like Post-Adire, it treats cloth and form as language; vehicles for ancestral memory, ritual technology, and gendered ambiguity. Both are concerned with presence and concealment, symbolism and structure, the aesthetics of reverence. #mood

Traces of Ecstasy, ICA at VCU, 2024 So honoured to revisit fragments of my cosmology shown in this remarkable exhibition. In these works, I continue to explore Yoruba dress traditions as living, sacred technologies. Indigo appears here not simply as pigment but as portal. I approach cloth and sculpture as languages of the erotic, the ritual, the remembered, the transformed. Through Post Adire, I engage indigenous resist dyeing practices as conceptual tools to imagine new queer realities rooted in ancestral knowing. The suspended textiles are stitched, torn, layered. Their scarred surfaces echo the wounded skin of the postcolonial African body. Their scale evokes tarpaulins, shelters, sacred enclosures. Working with women dyers in Abeokuta and bronze artisans in Benin, I return to craft as collaboration, as refusal, as insurgent memory. The garments are drawn from Gelede masquerade, where gender is already fluid, performative, metaphysical. These looks were activated in performance to honour Yoruba systems of embodiment that precede and exceed Western binaries. Alongside them, the bronze works; like Frot Interludes: A Devotee Conspiracy, speak directly to queer pleasure and spiritual power. Phallic, cast using the lost wax method, they channel ecstasy and conspiracy. Queer scepters invoking àṣẹ through the erotic. Objects of devotion, secrecy, longing. — Slide References 1. Look I (Project 5: Aṣọ Lànkí, Kí Ató Ki Èniyàn) 2. Frot Interludes: A Devotee Conspiracy + Orchid (Osun Sèègèsi) 3. Look II (Project 8: Cloth as a Queer Archive) 4. Aerial Proposition II (Post-àdìrẹ) 5. Look I (Project 5: Aṣọ Lànkí, Kí Ató Ki Èniyàn) featuring @raymondpinto Curated by @kj_abudu

Velvet Collapse Project 9.5 — Featuring @salemhuu Shot by @jorique___

Velvet Collapse Project 9.5 — Featuring @louloukoella in the Lover’s Keyhole Shirt Dress Crafted in 100% cotton poplin. Shot by @jorique___