LagosPhoto 2022 presents, Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects as an interrogation of lens based media’s influence in shaping, archiving and ordering memory within the corporal and how these construct community and individual identities.

Traditionally ethnographers have indulged in the fantastical and a tribe of contemporary artists working in relation to Africa and its various Diasporas obsess with phantasmagoria and futurity in dealing with contemporary issues. This disavowal of reality is challenged in Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects. We invite the future and the past to collapse into the present. The artists engage the language of photography to evolve a new language for our engagement.

Restitution of cultural artefacts, knowledge, history, memory and the urgency of vigilance in the Anthropocene are the pressing issues of our age. The way we capture and address our most pressing issues and present them for dialogical engagement will determine the way we shape the present and build our futures.

The human brainrecords and interpretsfactual and fictional instancesthrough the eyes,the camera in-like mannerbecame a bodily extension of the human mindfor shaping and sculpting images. First as a faithful documenter of events and happenings from the 19th century. Then later on as a tool for subjective, fictional narration that trick us into dream-like, imagined worlds.

Unwittingly, the camera became the mental augment that helps us, remember and dream, share memories,and imagine vivid worlds.

While the human mind is the site for the negotiations and fermentation of visual cues. Today, more than ever, humanity has migrated into the visual virtual space where the ocular language is transforming and evolving with rapid pace. These possibilities have allowed us to liberate and possibly augment our bodies, create extensions of ourselves and change the way we live and our capacity for self-expression as a global society. In a time where social media becomes a resource for petitions, affirmative action, social justice, policy or political action.

Remember Me—Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects; the theme for the 13th edition of LagosPhoto Festival invites us to challenge the subjectivity of (colonial) archives, build and populate sustainable new modes guided by ancestral and contemporary wisdom.