Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Rhythms 2nd, Transformative Edition : El Anatsui and Richard Serra : A Film on the Journey of Life as Visualized by Artists El Anatsui and Richard Serra.

thanks Gloria.

Falola is an explorer of the journeys, through time and space, of Africans and African-Americans and non-Africans who study or identify with Africans and their Diaspora brethren.

This exploration of journeying is demonstrated in diachronic terms, foregrounding human life as a passage through time. The focus on temporal progression is particularly evident in his explicitly historical works, such as his books on the history of Ibadan and his autobiographies.

His investigations of the  progression of human life also foregrounds the synchronic, centred in conditions as they exist at a particular point in time.

A good number of his works combine both approaches, such as the collection The Toyin Falola Reader, which conjoins discussions of temporal progression with expositions of particular ideological and cultural contexts,   and In Praise of Greatness, delineating the achievements of particular figures in the context of their journeys into those achievements, within the framework of the social conditions of their lives.

El Anatsui's artistic instillation Logoligi Logarithms and Richard Serra's sculptural complex The Matter of Time and some other works of Serra's,  explore the progression of experience through visual complexes.

These structures invite people's physical navigation of the fibre or steel constructs,  implicating the navigator in the work as one moves through the opaque nets and alleys of Anatsui's  Logoligi Logarithms   or the  steel undulations and circularities of The Matter of Time and the tunnels of other works of his.

The undulations of experience through which African and African-American societies have journeyed since the earliest times, as explored by Falola, the concentrations of possibility represented by strategic  periods in their histories,  the tension between coordinated and random developments in individual life, the intersection of consciousness and social matrices that shape people's existence, represented by Falola's verbal explorations, may be seen as incidentally evoked by both Anatsui and Serra's  visual configurations, as the navigator of their works moves through space and time, enacting possibilities enabled by their art's metaphoric concretisations of human experience.

On Wed, 1 May 2019 at 09:51, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:

Thanks for the film. It is really great to have a look at the great El Anatsui, 

  but  I really don't see the connections with TF's writings.

 Please clarify how you relate  the two.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net

http://web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html

Chief Editor- "Africa Update"

www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali

Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries

2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies

 University of Texas at Austin

2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   

New York African Studies Association

 

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:59 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Rhythms 2nd, Transformative Edition : El Anatsui and Richard Serra : A Film on the Journey of Life as Visualized by Artists El Anatsui and Richard Serra.

 

       

                                                                                                    

                                                          

                                                                                 Rhythms 

                                                                     2nd Transformative Edition

                                                                 El Anatsui and Richard Serra 

                                     A Film on the Journey of Life as Visualized by Artists El Anatsui and Richard Serra

                                                                           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                        Compcros

                                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                         "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                  

                                                                 

              Click on this link to see the film:   Rhythms : El Anatsui and Richard Serra 2nd Edition

A visual and verbal exploration of life's twists and transformations through the visual art of El Anatsui and Richard Serra as responded to by art critic Rikki Wemega-Kwawu and complemented by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju on the writings of Toyin Falola.

 

This second edition has a new musical score, more images and more text, facilitating better understanding of the film's theme.

 

 The film is inspired by art critic Wemega-Kwawu's Facebook post of 11th March 2019 on El Anatsui's installation "Lorgorligi Logarithms", I adapt that interpretation to Richard Serra's "The Matter of Time" and other works of Serra's and Anatsui's , Serra having been introduced to me by the discussion thread generated by Rikki's post.

 

The simplicity and profundity of the ideas expressed by Wemega-Kwawu's post are used in unifying images of the art of Anatsui and Serra, ideas I see as resonant across the various works in those images from various online sources.

 

These verbal and visual expressions are complemented by my distillations of biographical progression in relation to ideals of scholarly activity from the work of Toyin Falola in "Toyin Falola's In Praise of Greatness and its Intercultural Resonance in the Context of Classical Yoruba Hermeneutics", an essay under consideration for publication in the Yoruba Studies Review.

 

My reflections on Falola's work expand upon the impulse generated by Wemega-Kwawu, carrying forward their ideational possibilities as the images unfold.

 

This is an expanded second edition of the film benefiting from Wemega-Kwawu's critique of the first edition .

 

This edition has a new musical score, more images and more text, facilitating better understanding of the film's theme.  

 

Comments on the film are visible on its Facebook post.

 

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