Olalekan Jeyifous

Afrofuturism

Taisei Manheim

Before this year, Afrofuturism was a topic that was rarely discussed in an architectural context. Do you mind describing how it informs your practice and how your practice helps to define the topic?

Olakekan Jeyifous

I think it's just the way that I've been working, as a black person in America and also from the diaspora as well. Afrofuturism may not capture all that I'm doing, but I think it might also ground people in a way. I create speculations through the tradition of architectural utopianism, but through my own personal vantage point as a black person in America, having to think through systems of oppression and inequality and thinking about how we might work around these particular systems, or how they might inform a kind of speculative futuristic reimagining or even an alternative timeline.

Education

Mohammed T. Rahman

In the two years since the events surrounding George Floyd and the exponential increase of attention to movements like Black Lives Matter, architects, students, and faculty of color have been pushed to the forefront of all of these institutions of power. And it's almost like a way for these schools to reaffirm their diversity, but a lot of times it ends up placing a larger burden on us. And I think we were curious as to whether you think it's possible to be part of these institutions without getting exploited by them? Like, how do you find agency when you're a person of color in that situation?

Olakekan Jeyifous

Yeah that's a great question. Because you're right, it is complicated for professors and students, especially for professors who may want to put forth a particular curriculum. I think the way you avoid getting exploited is to ask for stuff and to do what you want to do unapologetically. Because it just puts your professors at an institution on the wrong side of history if they're pushing back against expanding the canon and being more inclusive. If you're a professor, you ask for grant money or research money, or you tell your department chair that you need this, in order to create a different kind of educational environment. There's always going to be the element of exploitation because they want you to do it in a way where it makes the school look good as well. Right? But you get something out of it, whether it's grants, different courses, or hiring practices. I’m not going to do things like draft the university’s diversity statements, but if they want to ask me to do something that has a material value or added benefit, I'll do that.

Mediums/Aesthetics

Mohammed T. Rahman

In addition to collages, you use a wide range of mediums to express your work. How does the project influence the mediums you pick and how do different mediums influence the thoughts behind the project?

Olakekan Jeyifous

So I think that's what I took the most from my architectural education, like finding the best way to articulate a particular narrative or concept or idea. I was fascinated by how the aesthetic or visual language that you're deploying works in service of getting your idea across. So in some of my works, if it's about being incredibly detailed and vivid and visceral, and really showing an enormous amount of information, hyperreal might be the best way to show it. But if it's about the relationship of the body to a kind of inventive futuristic armature or whatever, then it can be a kind of lo-fi, black and white simple thing, because it's much more about these characters, and the suggestiveness of the process of scavenging the resources that they're using to make new things, it's much more about that. And then for other projects, I may have a kind of eight bit aesthetic, because it's not about people in their interactions with buildings in space, but it's about bureaucracy, right? So I felt that maybe an eight bit way is a much better way to get across something that doesn't have much of a humanistic quality to it. So it becomes a much more of a digital aesthetic. So things like that, I like to think through, like what's the best way to get an idea across visually?

Mohammed T. Rahman

I think that's really fascinating, because as a student, I've had a lot of professors that treat architecture as this thing that’s autonomous from aesthetics, like the visual style doesn't even matter. They just have you design the beams, the columns, the walls, the roof, but don't even worry about the people that go inside of it. I feel like I think one of the things I admire the most about like movements like Afrofuturism is that it embraces aesthetics, not just as this visual perception of how things are, but more like seeing it as the result of these invisible forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, gentrification and how they sort of affect the built environment.

Olakekan Jeyifous

Yeah, aesthetics, particularly on the face of things like architecture are seen as trite. There's the professor's fear that you're being ostentatious with your slick renderings. But I think aesthetics, in terms of capturing the kind of spirit or ethos of a particular place, or trying to articulate a particular narrative or idea can become important. So for the project that I've done in Brooklyn, New York, the aesthetic that I'm interested in is the kind of bodega, pre-gentrified aesthetic. And to me, that becomes very important for preserving the communities that occupied these neighborhoods before they became heavily gentrified, before the architecture became those quasi-industrial boxes with the big windows, with a Helvetica number on the front.

Mohammed T. Rahman

It’s kind of like this fake International Style, just cheap with no authenticity.

Olakekan Jeyifous

Exactly, and that's a very clear aesthetic, right, because there’s an aesthetic to gentrification. So aesthetics become important to me, because I'm trying to use subway architecture, the urban fixtures of Brooklyn, brownstone architecture, pre war, and of course, the bodega as well. The language, the signage, the advertising, and the handwritten signs of the bodega, that language became important for me in a particular project that I was working on, because I'm trying to preserve the communities and the way they looked before they became gentrified. So for this project called The Frozen Neighborhoods, instead of a legend explaining what all the different aspects of my project are about, I took a picture of a bodega right up the street and I replaced all of the advertisement with explanations and maps for the community for my own world building exercise. So the Budweiser and Bud Light posters are replaced with an air filtration system or a rainwater harvesting gadgetry thing that I made. So all the information is in this Bodega storefront because that's the language and the aesthetic that I'm trying to preserve through this.

Worldbuilding

Taisei Manheim

Your projects are often situated in an area between dystopia and reality or maybe not even in between, but they're kind of both. So there's this idea with world building where it's imagining new worlds, but you're not. It's almost like you’re critiquing this world. So I guess, how do you see the process of world building, and what do you see as its purpose?

Olakekan Jeyifous

So some of my works are simultaneously critiques and that could be the dystopian aspects, and then what people have been able to produce, in spite of systems of inequality, become the inventive utopian aspects. And so those things occur simultaneously, like rap and all of black culture comes out of the experience of slavery and segregation. Our musical traditions come out of a way of communicating, being creative as a way of escape. So rock, blues, jazz, all of that comes out of very dystopian conditions, right? But they become very celebratory, amazing, brilliant, creative expressions. So that's what my world making does, it takes conditions and makes them worse. So The Frozen Neighborhoods is not only communities being marginalized, but also laws being passed saying you only get X amount of credits to travel or go anywhere. So then what does that community then look like when they no longer can leave? So then I make really cool sci fi, green technology, solar punk technologies out of those worlds, because that's just the condition of being here, against all of the odds, against all of these parameters and confines and aggressive inequality. So yeah, it ends up being both a dystopian condition and creating a possibly utopian world or outcome.

Advice/Agency

Taisei Manheim

Do you have any advice for students who want to go out into the world and create some kind of positive change?

Olakekan Jeyifous

Yeah, I would say collaborate and look at what other people are doing. I think you guys have much more of an opportunity for that now through social media and stuff, because you can find similarities with things that you're doing. I think that one of my biggest things is being open to working with someone who has a strength that I don't have. With my Shanty Mega-Structures, CNN did a hit story on the project and I was getting killed on social media because a bunch of folks from Lagos called it “ruined porn for Western consumption”. But then one writer was like, I think you're doing something really interesting. And after Shanty Mega-Structures was completed, the curator for the African mobilities exhibit was like, I want you to collaborate with someone from Lagos, maybe not an architect or artist, but a writer, and I was like, “Oh, I know just the person.”

Mohammed T. Rahman

I love that idea. Like you can find agency not just within yourself, but within others as well, and I think more people need to start hearing that message.

Olakekan Jeyifous

Yeah, it's true. I'm now collaborating much more broadly now because of talks that I’ve given or from people seeing my stuff, and I'm now working with a sociologist for a project I'm doing in Oakland, and it's so interesting because there's people doing similar thematic things, but they're doing it from a completely different angle. So by linking up and exchanging information, you can create really cool projects. I think architecture education has always been real arrogant, that we're philologists who do it all. And it's like you actually don't know more than the people who are anthropologists or economists. And you may be an amazing architecture school, but you're right next door to the international law school, and you're doing a project on international law, and you're not talking to anyone over there. So we're very insulated, and kind of elitist and arrogant about what we believe we know, but I think more interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary communication and interaction goes a long way.

inter • punct

interaction
INTENTION

interregnum
DEMOLITION
RECONSTRUCTION

interro bang !+?

conversations

inter • mission

newsletter

experiments

inter • view — 2016

para • meter — 2014

quarantine blog

instagram

bookshelf

info