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Wura-Natasha Ogunji
14 quotes
“I created the first version of Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? in 2011 in Lagos. I crawled along the ground with water kegs tied to my ankles. The piece was inspired by the daily task of carrying water at my cousin's house. I observed how this particular work was largely something that me and my female cousins performed. This is not to say that men do not do this task.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The performance on April 18 built upon this work but was performed with a group of women walking through the streets of Lagos, again hauling water kegs. While the piece poses questions about the work of women, it is also about labor and the politics of change. How much is enough? What is the tipping point in a society where people struggle to meet basic needs? When do people have an opportunity to rest, reflect, envision, imagine, and enact another way of being? I am particularly interested in the role of women in these dialogues.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like this thing of causing people to be curious. There’s a lot of watching of tragic things in this place so it’s nice when people can watch things that are inventive and different and strange and maybe a little foreign but familiar. This pushes their own visual sensibility and experience and touches on tradition or history but also is something completely outside of what they’ve seen before.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I say I want women to have this feeling of freedom, the only way that can happen is through something creative, through the thirty minutes that they had on the street.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had the idea to stitch on paper after seeing a poem my sister (who is also an artist) had stitched into the collar of her shirt. The stitched letters were so beautiful. I can still picture the grey letters against the blue fabric. My first stitched piece was a story about my father’s death, with images and text sewn into sheets of painted composition paper.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began using the tracing paper quite by accident. I was hiking with a friend and saw this small roll of paper on the path. I picked it up and was entranced, and then put it back down because I thought the person who had dropped it might return to look for it. My friend smiled and said, “I think that’s for you.” I’ve been using it ever since.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm interested in creating a particular exchange between the performers and the audience. This requires a kind of respect and consideration for the public which I don't at all associate with spectacles. When I think about a spectacle it brings to mind a particular image or event that is intended to shock. And things that shock us don't necessarily create opportunities for conversations or transformation. I love this question you are asking because it really gets at the challenge of creating meaningful performance.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As an artist I am creating certain parameters and asking certain questions but I don't determine the answers and I certainly don't own the experience. The collective is incredibly important to this process--be they audience members or performers or students trying performance for the first time or a bystander who participates. I expect the audience to do some work, to ask questions, to figure some things out on their own.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty was an incredible experience because we were in the middle of Obalende Motor Park. Hundreds of people passed by during the four hours that we were performing. They were watching us and we were watching them as intently. As performers we all spoke about that experience. We talked about even wanting to film the audience watching us. It's an incredible feeling, to be witnessed in this particular way by strangers and to also be in a position to really take in another person's presence, someone you don't even know.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The costumes refer to traditional masquerades but with an Afrofuturisic touch. Here, I am thinking about the Egungun masquerade which women are not allowed to perform. Masquerades are quite powerful for both community and performer. The masked dancer is allowed to go anywhere; they are protected. People are not allowed to even touch them. There are men who holds sticks (and use them) if you attempt to get too close. Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? draws from this tradition by allowing women to occupy a sacred and dynamic space within the public environment. But in this case, there is a constant recontextualization of the sacred and the profane as we perform the arduous (if not impossible) task of hauling water kegs through the city.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve always been interested in the way food connects us and connects us to people that are very different from us. The act of sitting down and having a meal with someone is a vulnerable experience in some ways and also opens us up. So that interest, which I’ve had for some while, has taken different forms in terms of performance, and for this project specifically I was really interested in how, in translating my experience and relationship to food in Nigeria to the U.S and bring the awkwardness and newness and the specificity of the food to the U.S., to connect with people and somewhat mimic the full experience of the food, either eating the food, or cooking the food, or having coffee with a person, so that the meal, or the coffee or the tea could be a vehicle to transport people to this other space.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder if we always want to share in that way, but that we’re not always asked to share. I wonder about the circumstances. There’s something powerful about sharing that information with a stranger, because they’re willing to listen and bring with them a non-judgemental stance and they are able to take. One part of this exercise was that the person answering the question had to talk for two minutes, and everyone else had to listen, they weren’t allowed to comment. That means we are asked to absorb and take note of what’s being said, instead of reacting and judging and trying to respond without stopping to listen. That’s a really different way of interacting with people and it’s very powerful.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My performance work is largely about the presence of women in public space in Lagos, Nigeria. How do you talk about freedom of movement and presence without actually having that experience? The performances are designed to give women an unprecedented experience of freedom in public space. This means they allow the performers to move through the streets, including in a busy market, and have people move out of the way, have the crowds actually defer to them. This is something that most women in the world never experience–to move through space and have people clear the path, and not because they’re being asked to make room or get out of the way, but because instinctively they know they must do it. It’s not a question of if or even why, it’s a given for them. This is deeply related to our beliefs and traditions around ‘masquerade.’ I use that word for lack of a better way to translate because masquerade suggests the putting on of a costume, of wearing a face that is not your face, but that superficially and physically covers you. But here, if we take the ancestor ceremony called Egungun as an example, we see that the dance, the procession brings a spirit into a community. You are not watching a person pretend to be something. I don’t think it would be correct to say that the person who is dancing embodies the spirit because that suggests some king of separation between spirit and flesh. When you see Egungun dance you are looking at the ancestor. The ancestor is present before you.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People always have a lot of questions. With beauty the five of us had our hair braided together and we stayed that way for four hours. There were people who said we wouldn't make it, that we wouldn't last the four hours. There was someone in the audience who talked about how this piece was for Nigerians. I understood that to mean that the person not only felt a connection to the work but that they thought it had relevance to this place and people specifically. My favorite response was a conversation with a young girl, perhaps she was 9 years old. She asked why we had done the performance and then I spoke with her about the connections we have as women to our hair and the even more important connections we have to each other. She understood that of course, she feels it too.”
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source