Foluso
Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
Interested in some of my published works?
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Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
Scammer: Hello, how are you doing?
Me: Very good. How about you?
Scammer: I’m fine, thanks for asking. how’s your day going so far?
Me: Excellent. Who are you?
Scammer: I’m Susan, from Idaho but currently living in Jacksonville Florida. I’m a registered nurse working with the UN nations overseas.
Facebook suggested you as someone I may know so I viewed your profile and decided to send you a request out of curiosity hoping we could get to know more about ourselves and maybe become friends.
Me: That’s great. Where are you currently working overseas?
Henry Drewall, the philosopher of sensiotics, wrote a couple of days ago that, “Moyo mi owon — you have turned pain into paint…for us to see and feel….”
He should know. Sensiotics is the archeology of feelings within the human sensibility.
This painting shared here is about the pain and joy of departures and arrivals, as one of my Transatlantic Series: in 1992, I started it in Nigeria just as I was relocating to the to the United States, where I completed it.
In the United States, the Zoom classroom is becoming the norm in an abnormal world.
It’s unbelievable that the death toll in the United States is nearing the 250,000 number.
That sort of figure is beyond imagination—one-quarter of a million people dead.
How does one wrap one’s mind around that sort of number, in terms of fallen heroes in a single war that has not yet even lasted one year?.
Whereas in Africa, hardly anyone is dying.
When last week the press reported the fall of Jerry Rawlings to the pandemic, it was so shocking, because in Nigeria, everybody is wining, dining, partying, and marketing as if nothing is going on, and everything is honky-dory.
His ordeal began with a brief phone call.
“Hallo? Hallo? Honorable! Are you there? Your mother. She was stolen from her house.”
A sharp pain pinched him in the middle of the chest and traveled slowly down to the bottom of his stomach.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” he thought.
For the past week he had been nursing an ominous feeling that something beyond his control was going to happen. Somehow his mind kept going to his mother.
He was thinking of driving to the village this weekend to visit her.
“Hallo? Hallo? Are you still there?” the voice asked again.
Are you a twin?
Yes, you are.
We are all twins.
Some drag their twin other to the world.
Most of us leave ours back at the source, in the other world.
When we talk to ourselves, we are ritually chatting with our twin in the other world.
In Yorubaland, twin births are frequent.
“Come here and swear, you this adult, that you never were a troubled youth,” Iya Oyo said, when I told her the story of my friend, Gift Krani-Rijal. Her comment is a Yoruba proverb that says, “Àgbà wá búra péwe ò ṣe ọ́ rí.”
Being young is probably the most dangerous thing anybody could experience.