The [Re:]Entanglements project featured prominently in the 2021 Igbo Conference, with its themes of rebirth, renewal and regeneration. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the conference was held online, but lively debates followed the various talks.
[Re:]Entanglements project researchers George Agbo of the Department of Fine & Applied Arts and Glory Chika-Kanu of the Department of Political Sciences, both University of Nigeria, Nsukka, made fascinating presentations based on our fieldwork with the Northcote Thomas archives. You can watch their presentations below.
George Agbo discusses how the power of sacred shrines and landscapes has been appropriated by the Church to form new syncretic belief systems, drawing on both traditional Igbo and Christian belief systems. He draws on examples including the Mpuniyi Ara shrine in Nimo, the Idemili shrine in Agulu and Ngene Ngendo shrine in Nibo, all of which were visited and photographed by Northcote Thomas in 1911, to discuss the transformations these sites have undergone over the past 100 years.
Glory Chika-Kanu discusses continuing belief in Ilọ Ụwa (reincarnation) among Igbo communities and how this became evident through our fieldwork returning Northcote Thomas’s photographic portraits of individuals to the locations in which they were originally taken in 1911. Glory explores the different ways in which people identify their ancestors, including those whom they reincarnate, through the agency of the archival photographs.
Members of the Art Assassins examine artefacts collected by Northcote Thomas during his anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone during a visit to UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Labs.
One of our objectives in the [Re:]Entanglements project is to reach out to a wide range of communities to explore the different values, meanings and possibilities they perceive in the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys. This includes people living in the towns and villages in which Thomas worked in Nigeria and Sierra Leone over a century ago, but also artists, activists, academics and others who identify with the groups Thomas studied in one way or another – regardless of where they live now.
We have recently begun a new collaboration funded by the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund with the Art Assassins – a youth forum based at the South London Gallery in Peckham. Peckham is a wonderfully diverse area of London, where there is a large British-Nigerian and Sierra Leonean community. The South London Gallery – or SLG, as it is now known – is a vibrant cultural hub. Its young people’s programme, which includes the Art Assassins and REcreative, who we shall also be working with, is especially inspiring.
South London Gallery’s newly-opened ‘Fire Station’ annexe on Peckham Road, South East London. The Art Assassins will be curating an exhibition at the annexe in May 2020 based on their engagement with the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys.
This is the first of a regular series of blogs that members and coordinators of the Art Assassins will post as the project develops. The project will culminate in an exhibition based on their engagement with the Northcote Thomas archives and collections that the Art Assassins will curate in the SLG’s new Fire Station annexe in May 2020. Over to the Art Assassins…
My name is Tommie Introna, and I have been working with the Art Assassins over the last two-and-a-half years. The Art Assassins is an ever-evolving group for young people aged between 14 and 20 years old that formed ten years ago at SLG. They work collaboratively with each other and with established artists and experts to create platforms that represent themselves and their ideas.
Over the coming months, we will be working with SOAS, UCL’s Museum Conservation programme, the Igbo Studies Initiative, Autograph ABP, two ‘researchers-in-residence’, Emmanuelle Andrews and Emma Dabiri, and artists including Onyeka Igwe and Rosa-Johan Uddoh to examine the archives and collections associated with Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The project will enable young people in South London to get an insight into the professional world of archives and museums as they engage with the photographs, sound recordings, artefacts, botanical specimens and texts relating to Thomas’s surverys. We will be visiting the institutions that care for them today, and explore other related collections, gaining insights into conservation practice, collections based research and curatorship.
Some of the researchers and artists that the Art Assassins will be working with as they explore Thomas’s anthropological collections and archives. From left to right: Emmanuelle Andrews, Onyeka Igwe, Emma Dabiri and Rosa-Johan Uddoh.
Working with these anthropological
archives and collections from the early twentieth century will provide an
opportunity to explore colonial history in Britain and West Africa. This is an
area that is neglected in the school curriculum, but central to the experiences
of many communities living in South London today. We will be working with
researchers and artists to explore how history can inform our understanding of
our everyday lives and our collective futures.
The Art Assassins are introduced to ethnography and ethnographic collecting during a visit to the new World Gallery at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London. Curator, Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, shows the group displays of brass plaques looted from the Oba’s Palace in Benin City during the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, opening up a discussion of the politics of colonial collections and current repatriation debates. Northcote Thomas spent several months in Benin City during his tour of Edo-speaking peoples in 1909-10, just 12 years after the Punitive Expedition.
The project has only recently begun, but already we have been very busy. We have been introduced to the field of ethnography and the history of ethnographic collecting during a visit to the Horniman Museum’s recently refurbished World Gallery. We have got to handle some of the artefacts collected by Thomas during his surveys and learnt about the process of museum conservation in a visit to the Conservation Labs at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. We have had an initial meeting with Onyeka Igwe, the first of the artists with whom we will be working. And we have had several sessions now in which we have begun to discuss our initial ideas and plans for the project.
Members of the Art Assassins share their initial ideas about the Northcote Thomas archives and collections in their regular meeting room at the South London Gallery’s Fire Station annexe.
We are really excited about the project and can’t wait to see what develops through the collaboration. We’ll be posting regular updates to the [Re:]Entanglements blog and you will also be able to follow our progress through Instagram.
The Art Assassins welcomes new members. If you are aged 14-20 and able to meet regularly at our base in Peckham, South London, please join us! Drop us an email at [email protected]
Tommie Introna, Young People’s Programme Coordinator, South London Gallery.
