Introduction
Hello, my name is Bunmi Agusto (pronounced Boo-mee Ah-goose-toe, there is a swallowed ‘n’ in there but I do not know how to express that in text). I am a visual artist, writer, curator and art historian focused on fantasy and magical storytelling, often in West Africa. In order to provide the wider context that forms my research interests, this introduction will serve as a summary of my personal history, academic trajectory and creative pursuits.
I was born in Lagos, Nigeria and lived there for the first sixteen years of my life, except for four years during which I lived in Abuja. I’d always held a complicated notion of Nigerianness because I was not always raised within singular social categories. My late father was a Yoruba Muslim from Lagos and my mother is an Edo Christian from Benin City. We would go to church on Sundays then host parties for Eid. I would wear corals for one family wedding then iro and buba for another. Even within my Yorubaness, therein lays the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. My father’s great-grandfather Abubakar Joāo Agusto was kidnapped as a child and taken to Brazil where he was enslaved for several years before being freed, returning to Nigeria and settling in Lagos. So in addition to eating eba & ogbono and pounded yam & black soup, I’d sometimes eat frejon growing up. Also, my father’s mother Kudirat Olande Agusto (née Lawani-Kakawa) was from Benin Republic so I further understood Yorubaness that was sliced by borders but still spilled over lines of nationality.
I moved to the UK to continue my education at the age of sixteen but still visited Lagos frequently. When I was in boarding school in Nigeria, I was more so perceived as a student who leaned towards mathematics and IT. This was true but I had sustained an interest in the arts as much as I had in those subjects. In fact, when asked how I got into art in interviews nowadays I often joke, ‘The same way the accountant got into math.’ Whilst trying to decide what to study at university, I oscillated between architecture, mathematics (which I was beginning to falter in), film and art. After beginning to consider studying undeclared in the US —a light nightmare for a Nigerian parent— my father simply said to me, “Go and do what you know how to do. That is art.”
I subsequently attended Central Saint Martins for my undergraduate degree in Fine Art. That environment truly cultivated all the weirdness and quirks in me, but I wouldn’t say I learnt how to truly wield them by the end of that degree. During my time at CSM, I made a black and white self-portrait with red bubblewrap spilling out of my mouth, a scenic landscape painting supported by milk cartons, larger-than-life cling film wrapped sculptures of fish skeletons and so on.
In my second year, I studied abroad at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK) for five months. At the time, I had to travel between Lagos, London and The Hague so out of a disdain for handling logistics, I committed to primarily making digital works in those months. So I learnt how to use Procreate, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects and began making digital paintings and animated GIFs. Due to a sparse social life in foreign land, I also spent a lot of time holed up in an attic studio apartment playing The Sims. This also happened to be the year between Avengers Infinity War (2018) and Avengers Endgame (2019) so I also watched countless videos on YouTube speculating on how the Infinity Saga was going to end. I mention this because this was extremely important and pivotal in my trajectory. My fascination with The Sims and the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the intricate stories they were able to weave over decades is what planted the seeds that would eventually inspire me to build my own world. It was in my third and final year of my undergraduate degree that I drew the eight hybrids that would become lead characters and the first indigenous peoples of the paracosm at the centre of my artistic practice today.
If my time at CSM and KABK was for untamed growth, then my postgraduate endeavours were for weeding, reshaping and finessing. However, before I went on to pursue my master degrees, I engaged in critical work writing for a friend’s now discontinued art blog known A’naala and collaborating with YANA to create a digital archive of research into Nigerian and West African architecture. The latter project was born out of my longtime love for architecture and a worry that the next generation of Nigerian architects would simply continue replicating Western architecture in Nigeria —a nation whose buildings have to withstand a very different set of climate and social factors to that of most of the West. The knowledge gained from this project bled into my world-building endeavours significantly because it is one thing to create characters; it is another to build them a world. Today, one can find many allusions to tropical architecture, such as breeze blocks and thatched structures, in my drawings. It was during my MFA in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford —which I would attend after SOAS— that I was able to take all my research interests and lived experiences and harness them into a truly coherent evolving art practice.
By the time, I began my MA in History of Art & Archaeology at SOAS University in 2022, I was hugely fascinated by dreams, folktales, spirits and magic. I was set on my current research trajectory serendipitously when I misunderstood the expected content of a module I undertook called ‘Islamic Visual Culture’. I went into that class expecting to learn about the arts and architecture of the Islamic World —which I was interested in because the legacy of Islam in my father’s family and I have often enjoyed Islamic design and their philosophies— but I was surprised to learn that the course would actually be about visuality in the Islamic World. The rest of the class was as confused as I was and found the concept of visuality difficult to grasp at first. The definition I came to understand was Renata Holod’s explanation of visuality as the study of ‘the site of sight, right of sight and rite of sight’1 (2004). Over the course of the module, we studied the mashrabiya, the hijab, the evil eye —essentially how vision is filtered, permitted, absorbed and reflected in the Islamic world— but what caught my attention was al-ghayb (the unseen). Al-ghayb encapsulates all elements and forces that cannot be (usually) seen by our eyes, such as angels, demons, the future, etc. This significantly aligned with the fascinations I held at the time and I decided to look into the concept of the unseen in a Yoruba context. This led me to study and write about the egúngún masquerade —a masked performer believed to be an avatar for the deceased spirit during Yoruba funeral rites— for my thesis.
In that thesis, I also sought to contextualise these artworks in a defined conceptual framework and ended up looking to Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanjujuism, Kameelah Martin’s Black Feminist VooDoo Aesthetics and Conjure Feminism. I mostly so aligned my research with Africanjujuism which Okorafor defines as ‘a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative’2 (2019). Therefore, I will further question this as a viable conceptual framework in art history as well as explore its leading tropes and contemporary remediations in following essays.
So yeah, that’s me. That is the goal. Welcome!
1-minute video-lecture: Renata Holod, “Site of Sight, Right of Sight, and Rite of Sight: Exploring the Cultures of Seeing,” School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/site-sight-right-sight-and-rite-sight-exploring-cultures-seeing)
Okorafor, Nnedi. 2019. "Africanfuturism Defined". Blog. Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog. http:// nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.