In Motion, my first solo exhibition in Lagos

rain dance 1, Oyo town, 2016, Edouard Blondeau

Three years ago, as I first came to Lagos, this blog started with the question "walking or not walking?" (on the streets of Lagos). Since then, every single day has been a new step of appropriation of the space. This process of familiarisation has been documented with photography and texts throughout this blog. I have also more recently decided to materialise this quest into a more artistic venture, namely an art exhibition called "In Motion", at 16/16 a hip space in Victoria Island. 16/16, led by Tushar Hathiramani, is a place where an ecclectic mix of people gathers around drinks or thai food during art exhibitions and performances. It is located in a flat traversed by light on the 8th floor of 16 Kofo-Abayomi street with a superbe view on the lagoon.
I approached Tushar with some of my works created over a lapse of 3 years and it transpired from it that the concept of movement was a recurring pattern. This led to the development of the concept of the exhibition which happened on March 9th-18th, 2018.

In Motion is about movement in time and movement in space

Movement in Space is explored through dance. I travelled severally in the Yoruba heartland and came, unprepared, across acts of dancing. This happened in different locations: first in the beautiful and captivating sacred Groves in Osogbo, then in a private house in Oyo and finally looking for shelter, in the palace of the Alaafin in Oyo, during a storm that turns the ground into a river.
The harmony of dancing, these ancestral moves transmitted from generation to generation, transcended the space into which the action was taking place. Difficult lighting conditions made long exposures a requirement to capture these scenes, hence the occasional motion blur which helped bring out the furtive essence of movement. Blur also brings out the essence of action by abstracting the background into a neutral and dreamy representation. The use of black and white was deliberate to focus attention on the performers of the dance.

Spinning, 2016, Edouard Blondeau

Movement in time came as a deeper investigation of movement capture. By extension, the blur is replaced by a juxtaposition of samples of an action on a two dimensional surface. The background of each samples has been removed to focus on the subject of the action performed. This is what we see in the Actionoscopes. On those the mind is free to reconstruct what has been deconstructed to create its own narrative. It is like putting several pieces of a puzzle together. For this series I chose to use material from the beach, except for the calabash fishing piece which took place on Kaduna river. I must say I was seduced by the flamboyance and glamour of people on the beach, watching it was like following a series of eye-catching elements of ordinary people's recreational moments. Snippets of moments that I synthesized in the actionoscopes.
More recently I have explored layering the background with African prints to convey the energy of colours that people wear into particular scenes such as Taking the ram by the horns.

Taking the ram by the horns, 2018, Edouard Blondeau

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