Video Collage
Background
Ojú-Inu (inner eye) is a moving-image collage comprised of live action, audiovisual archival and found material, the artist’s personal video journals and photography, and an original soundscape, that speak to the role of media in the formation of the collective consciousness and unconsciousness. In response to Danse Macabre, 2023, Ojú-Inu continues to draw on Jung’s model of the human psyche in tandem with the Yoruba understanding of the self and its relationship with the collective.
Ojú-Inu explores the role that the content and rhetoric of the media plays in the formation of human behaviours in the 21st century. The work illuminates the ways in which the media industrial complex serves white supremacist capitalist imperialism and patriarchal normativity, and the consequential limits that these systems of domination place on the body, and indeed individual and collective freedoms.
As in the Haitian revolution and slave rebellions in Brazil in the 18th and 19th centuries, where west African ancestral practices were invoked as a gateway to liberation, Ojú-Inu draws on these conceptual and aesthetic frameworks to galvanise resistance to centuries of European and British imperialism. And in co-opting Audre Lorde’s stance that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house; this work highlights the urgency of revisiting the (almost extinct) ancestral philosophies of oppressed peoples, as a gateway towards just and equitable futures.
CREDITS
Directed by
Tobi Onabolu
Produced by
Gabriella Lafor
Performance by
Rose Sall Sao
Composer
Ryan Majoris
Edited by
Tobi Onabolu & Shani O’Mallo
DOP
Nic Wassell
Drone Operator
Drone Capone
Gaffer
London Lighting
Production Stylist
Seyon Amosu
Children’s Singing
Belvine Amoussougboto
Jolivet Amoussougboto
Godwin Amoussougboto
Driver
Rowntree