1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:05,580 In this second part, we'll be focussing on more contemporary perspectives from West Africa. 2 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:13,110 And our first speaker will be David Paton is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology of Africa. 3 00:00:13,110 --> 00:00:18,330 They will perhaps his work has concerned south eastern Nigeria for a long time. 4 00:00:18,330 --> 00:00:28,770 Themes of youth violence. And today [INAUDIBLE] be talking about the arts of oil use insecurity and intimacy in the popular arts of the Niger Delta. 5 00:00:28,770 --> 00:00:36,060 Thank you very much. I'm so I'm really sorry. I've got a cold the sniffles through this as best I can. 6 00:00:36,060 --> 00:00:44,460 So my current research with colleagues at the University of Port Harcourt engages with the emerging field of oil culture or petro culture. 7 00:00:44,460 --> 00:00:53,880 Studies aims to make visible the conspicuously invisible role of oil in everyday life and culture, 8 00:00:53,880 --> 00:00:57,930 and to do so by examining the cultural history of Port Harcourt, 9 00:00:57,930 --> 00:01:05,760 a symbol and a catalyst of Nigeria's incorporation into the global economy of energy capitalism. 10 00:01:05,760 --> 00:01:10,230 Scholarship in the energy humanities shows the importance of investigating 11 00:01:10,230 --> 00:01:16,320 how text images performance serves to stimulate and sustain the oil economy, 12 00:01:16,320 --> 00:01:26,760 and how the concept of spectacle particularly helps us understand ideas of progress and prosperity upon which petroleum based economies are based. 13 00:01:26,760 --> 00:01:37,200 It also highlights the intimate domestic ways in which oil structures, ways of life, and how aspirations of normative familial life. 14 00:01:37,200 --> 00:01:47,670 Assumptions of ideal liberal, pluralist societies and urban regimes of living are all premised on cheap petrol consumption, 15 00:01:47,670 --> 00:01:54,600 and this scholarship explores the ambivalence of oil to examines not only the promotion of oil culture, 16 00:01:54,600 --> 00:02:06,270 but those forms of social commentary and moral economy in which resistance and critique suggest alternative, even post oil futures. 17 00:02:06,270 --> 00:02:14,940 So what I'm looking at is how the popular arts reflect the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment with the Nigerian petro states. 18 00:02:14,940 --> 00:02:23,940 In what ways do the popular arts celebrate its profits and politics and critique its inequalities and injustices? 19 00:02:23,940 --> 00:02:26,910 Is the popular culture of oil a protest culture? 20 00:02:26,910 --> 00:02:35,910 Can we demonstrate the role of political ecology on cultural creativity in local arts and in the Diaspora? 21 00:02:35,910 --> 00:02:40,800 So the context of this research is the Niger Delta, specifically Port Harcourt. 22 00:02:40,800 --> 00:02:50,940 As I say, it's a symbol and a catalyst of Nigeria's incorporation into the global economy of energy capitalism, a colonial construction. 23 00:02:50,940 --> 00:02:56,370 The city's origins lie in the 1999 discovery of oil. 24 00:02:56,370 --> 00:03:01,050 The owner of coal, the only coal found in West Africa. 25 00:03:01,050 --> 00:03:05,760 So huge significance to railway and steamer logistics. 26 00:03:05,760 --> 00:03:09,270 So the ports of Port Harcourt was named after Louis Harcourt, 27 00:03:09,270 --> 00:03:19,770 who served as secretary of state for the colonies in the early 1910s with the discovery of oil at Oloibiri in Rivers province in 1956. 28 00:03:19,770 --> 00:03:25,290 Shell, Dorsey later Shell BP established its headquarters in the city. 29 00:03:25,290 --> 00:03:35,460 Foreign companies were granted licences later on, including the oil giant Agip, who started production in 1962 and also located their offices. 30 00:03:35,460 --> 00:03:41,280 Actually, kind of paramilitary compounds within the city of Port Harcourt say from coal, 31 00:03:41,280 --> 00:03:47,340 Port Harcourt had become an important node in the global economy. 32 00:03:47,340 --> 00:03:55,920 The ethnic politics of the city were characterised by the increasing frustrations of the Ijaw speaking riverine minorities at 33 00:03:55,920 --> 00:04:05,910 upland Igbo domination of political and economic opportunity structures through to independence in 1960 and the Civil War in 1967. 34 00:04:05,910 --> 00:04:12,810 The events of the Nigerian Civil War proved to be a significant watershed in the city's social and political development, 35 00:04:12,810 --> 00:04:19,830 with the liberation of the city in 1968 from Biafran control consequent displacement of Igbo residents. 36 00:04:19,830 --> 00:04:24,990 Profoundly, shift shifted the demography and property owning structures of the city. 37 00:04:24,990 --> 00:04:36,510 So as a consequence, minority delta languages and cultural performances have been celebrated at the forefront of local cultural politics. 38 00:04:36,510 --> 00:04:47,520 Since the founding of Rivers state in 1967, the historical landscape of Port Harcourt illustrates this history quite neatly. 39 00:04:47,520 --> 00:04:56,100 One of the best known highlife musicians of the 1960s, Cardinal Rex Lawson, was a trumpeter and bandleader from Calabar. 40 00:04:56,100 --> 00:05:00,560 I spread the influence of the Cuban inspired brass bass. 41 00:05:00,560 --> 00:05:09,170 Internationally and Lawson's fame preceded the oil boom through his music, he spoke in kind of the Palestina of the city. 42 00:05:09,170 --> 00:05:18,650 He sang in many of the local languages and celebrated the exploits of Isaac Barros abortive secessionist 43 00:05:18,650 --> 00:05:26,690 movement and the Ijaw Volunteer Force Declaration of the Niger Delta Republic in February 1966. 44 00:05:26,690 --> 00:05:38,840 But in terms of the political timeline of this relationship between arts and oil, Nnamdi Goomba and Obioma, who are collaborators on this project, 45 00:05:38,840 --> 00:05:47,150 identify the Ogoni protest against Shell and the Nigerian government in the early 1990s and the execution of cancer. 46 00:05:47,150 --> 00:05:58,700 We were in 1995 as the key historical watershed in the development of eco aesthetics in the Niger Delta and Port Harcourt specifically. 47 00:05:58,700 --> 00:06:09,620 Since then, the insurgency crisis of 2007, the amnesty of 2009 mark other important watersheds. 48 00:06:09,620 --> 00:06:14,690 What's emerged through this history is through literature, through film. 49 00:06:14,690 --> 00:06:23,810 Photography is a production of a very standard genre and explaining the kind of circumstances of the Niger Delta 50 00:06:23,810 --> 00:06:33,470 through the plight of marginalised communities duped of their rightful oil wealth by corrupt nepotistic leaders, 51 00:06:33,470 --> 00:06:43,670 politicians and chiefs. So the standard representation of youth across multiple media is male and violent. 52 00:06:43,670 --> 00:06:51,320 As you can see here in kind of Nollywood genre of the militants movie, 53 00:06:51,320 --> 00:07:02,750 a very kind of established genre where the settings of the actors, the plots are all very similar. 54 00:07:02,750 --> 00:07:14,000 You see here an image of some day the usual leader of the freedom fighters of local youth. 55 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:23,600 Sam is not only he was he the kind of figurehead of the vigilante genre of Nollywood movies, 56 00:07:23,600 --> 00:07:32,300 but he now teaches theatre at the University of Port Harcourt and is another participant in this project. 57 00:07:32,300 --> 00:07:42,140 So you see this kind of established genre emerge within Nollywood that focuses on portrayals and defections of warlord networks. 58 00:07:42,140 --> 00:07:45,590 It traces the emergence of often faceless militant cults. 59 00:07:45,590 --> 00:07:55,280 Boys seen here in caches collect controversial documentary photographs of the delta that 60 00:07:55,280 --> 00:08:02,210 criticised often for a kind of National Geographic aesthetic that traces the emergence. 61 00:08:02,210 --> 00:08:08,780 As I say, these kind of militant cult boys displaced and dispossessed defending indigenous rights, 62 00:08:08,780 --> 00:08:19,490 usually protected by traditional rights in the different sense in their operations against the oil companies and the security forces who protect them. 63 00:08:19,490 --> 00:08:25,730 So this genre, then this established genre bears witness to the structural violence world politics. 64 00:08:25,730 --> 00:08:33,410 It draws out the lines of inclusion and exclusion that have led to this situation, where since 2009, 65 00:08:33,410 --> 00:08:41,540 the state pays monthly stipends to former youth militants not to fight and awards contracts 66 00:08:41,540 --> 00:08:49,310 to former warlords to provide security on the very pipelines that were tapped to steal crude. 67 00:08:49,310 --> 00:08:54,110 So these are kind of classic images of and representations of the kind of 68 00:08:54,110 --> 00:09:01,130 victims and vanguards that we associate with narratives of West African youth. 69 00:09:01,130 --> 00:09:09,740 But the arts of oil in Port Harcourt capture other dimensions to this intergenerational politics and say in this paper, 70 00:09:09,740 --> 00:09:21,200 I also just wanted to focus briefly on literature and masking to look at other dimensions in relation to intimacy and vulnerability. 71 00:09:21,200 --> 00:09:33,200 So a little known fact, but you may have come across that date of 2014 as when Port Harcourt was the UNESCO's World Book Capital. 72 00:09:33,200 --> 00:09:37,500 This was the climax of a significant literary history for the city combined. 73 00:09:37,500 --> 00:09:44,690 A building on the city's literary legacy of alleged Ahmadis works great ponds, the concubine. 74 00:09:44,690 --> 00:09:49,730 And so we was only at work. You might have heard of Susan Boyle, 75 00:09:49,730 --> 00:09:57,350 a novel written in pidgin English about the Nigerian Civil War and recent work 76 00:09:57,350 --> 00:10:05,840 and investment in By Shell in a large book centre is a huge number of poetry. 77 00:10:05,840 --> 00:10:13,910 Clubs and book clubs in the city have come out of this particular moment. 78 00:10:13,910 --> 00:10:20,240 And so there's a kind of celebration really, of recent work from the Niger Delta, 79 00:10:20,240 --> 00:10:26,750 from Port Harcourt that's produced an important scene of Echo criticism. 80 00:10:26,750 --> 00:10:35,510 And it creates what the taps to saw, for example, was described as a quintessential example of petro magic realism. 81 00:10:35,510 --> 00:10:40,070 It captures the intertwining collusion of private and political interests. 82 00:10:40,070 --> 00:10:52,190 Oak taps to confront signs of the Delta oil company, where trespassers will be persecuted to the sense of place, is palpable in these new novels. 83 00:10:52,190 --> 00:10:59,840 Quite contrary to Gauci assertion that the experiences associated with oil are lived out within a space that is no place at all. 84 00:10:59,840 --> 00:11:04,790 A world that's intrinsically displaced, heterogeneous and international. 85 00:11:04,790 --> 00:11:11,510 So recent novels by Kay Negeri Yellow Yellow Jamaica Garrix tomorrow died yesterday and July after many 86 00:11:11,510 --> 00:11:19,100 days highlight the perils associated with the Delta region since the militant insurgency of the 2000s. 87 00:11:19,100 --> 00:11:28,100 Hear themes of personal and political loss are interwoven against the landscape of protest, violence, kidnapping, oil theft and broken dreams. 88 00:11:28,100 --> 00:11:30,830 In the city of Port Harcourt, 89 00:11:30,830 --> 00:11:37,940 a Garry's yellow yellow narrates the story of the daughter of the relationship between an expatriate and a local Ijaw woman. 90 00:11:37,940 --> 00:11:43,880 Yellow refers to her skin colour. She moves to Port Harcourt, is adopted by a wealthy contractor, 91 00:11:43,880 --> 00:11:53,030 has an affair with a prominent ex-military politician of enchantment with the comforts of elite privilege is never far from a critical realisation. 92 00:11:53,030 --> 00:11:56,810 As Gary writes, the water that flowed with streaks of blue, 93 00:11:56,810 --> 00:12:02,330 purple and Red Hat drops of oil escaped from the pipelines that move the wealth from beneath 94 00:12:02,330 --> 00:12:09,230 my land and into the pockets of the select few who ruled Nigeria was the same water I drank. 95 00:12:09,230 --> 00:12:17,330 And it's this critical exploitation of the delta environment of its youth and of yellow and her virginity that sets an unusually female 96 00:12:17,330 --> 00:12:28,280 perspective on personal agency fertility and bodies against the standard political narrative of male youth protest and violence. 97 00:12:28,280 --> 00:12:31,250 I'll come back to this. But overall, as Vanessa argues, 98 00:12:31,250 --> 00:12:38,270 the poetry and fiction emerging from and in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta points to a political ecology of 99 00:12:38,270 --> 00:12:46,580 literature to motivate and relationship between literary production and conflicts involving natural resources. 100 00:12:46,580 --> 00:12:52,910 I also just want to focus on masking and a conversation that I'm exploring between histories of 101 00:12:52,910 --> 00:13:00,380 youth masking traditions and artistic reinterpretations of masking in the context of the delta. 102 00:13:00,380 --> 00:13:03,830 So as many of you will know, I've been working on this particular mask. 103 00:13:03,830 --> 00:13:11,120 I gather for some time in his novel, published in 1965. 104 00:13:11,120 --> 00:13:27,260 Chinua Achebe in the era of God, describes the emergence of I Gather within the Riverland and describes it as a big, 105 00:13:27,260 --> 00:13:32,750 heavy mask capturing masculine power and authority. 106 00:13:32,750 --> 00:13:37,640 During the event, the play men with one another to mark their bravery. 107 00:13:37,640 --> 00:13:42,830 In Achebe's words again, I stood for the power and aggressiveness of youth. 108 00:13:42,830 --> 00:13:52,730 It captures the essence of the mask perfectly. Sometimes it's called Moby-Dick, the time of the brave, and during the colonial period, 109 00:13:52,730 --> 00:14:02,630 I gather Medicaid becomes iconic of a kind of backward conservative male patriarchy. 110 00:14:02,630 --> 00:14:12,350 In many discourses, it becomes the devil. A kind of evil force is captured brilliantly in the Oscar winning colonial propaganda film. 111 00:14:12,350 --> 00:14:20,110 They break in beauty in 1949, which is the story of the construction of a colonial. 112 00:14:20,110 --> 00:14:30,830 Thehospital, the forces of the elders opposing the recruitment of new nurses and an installation of these new facilities, 113 00:14:30,830 --> 00:14:41,930 of course, are, I gather, masquerades that come out of the forest at night to intimidate these new colonial subjects. 114 00:14:41,930 --> 00:14:46,700 So its origin, the origin of is in Northern Ireland. 115 00:14:46,700 --> 00:14:51,830 But as Igbo traders moved across the country, so they took their masks with them. 116 00:14:51,830 --> 00:15:03,050 And here's an image of I gather in southwestern Nigeria in the late 1940s and with labour migration to Port Harcourt, 117 00:15:03,050 --> 00:15:12,980 I gather was performed on the streets of the poorer neighbourhoods Jobin main town at Christmas and Easter on IBO Day through the 1950s, 118 00:15:12,980 --> 00:15:19,520 some of the early clubs were known as Montana, linked perhaps to the cowboy cults. 119 00:15:19,520 --> 00:15:23,030 Gangs that I mentioned before that were linked to watching westerns in the 120 00:15:23,030 --> 00:15:30,020 cinema with the Civil War there and with the displacement of Igbo population. 121 00:15:30,020 --> 00:15:39,730 The play continues, but not in Igbo hands, in the hands of Calvary and Okereke and young men. 122 00:15:39,730 --> 00:15:47,900 It moved into the abandoned property of the city and from here the play expanded. 123 00:15:47,900 --> 00:15:51,950 This is the kind of first image is very blurred that I have of. 124 00:15:51,950 --> 00:15:57,230 I gather in Port Harcourt and this particular play again comes from the movies. 125 00:15:57,230 --> 00:16:07,730 The name of it comes from the movie zero seven. During the 1980s and 90s, the Agaba syndrome was a kind of name, 126 00:16:07,730 --> 00:16:16,070 referring to the limited transition of young people between secondary school and university education. 127 00:16:16,070 --> 00:16:26,180 It became a kind of label for school dropouts and the unemployed, who joined street gangs and area of movie networks. 128 00:16:26,180 --> 00:16:34,070 And from there, the there's a kind of explicit association that I have to be very careful in 129 00:16:34,070 --> 00:16:41,030 explaining this between I gather as a cultural performance and a masquerade troupe, 130 00:16:41,030 --> 00:16:50,360 as you see here and the militant groups that led the insurgency across the delta in the early 2000s. 131 00:16:50,360 --> 00:16:59,240 So it's not a correct or appropriate to sort of say that I gather kind of morphed into these cults, 132 00:16:59,240 --> 00:17:12,950 but rather certain prominent individuals who are well known as the Kappa Boys led the emergence 133 00:17:12,950 --> 00:17:21,290 of particular street gangs de Bama and de Waal that were themselves linked to university cults, 134 00:17:21,290 --> 00:17:33,530 the Vikings and the Buccaneers to become what were known as kind of St and Creek alliances that led into the delta, 135 00:17:33,530 --> 00:17:42,500 particularly after the 2003 election, when these factions and they were aligned against one another, 136 00:17:42,500 --> 00:17:52,850 lined up around Asari Dokubo on the left and one kind of faction and a ticket home on the right, 137 00:17:52,850 --> 00:17:59,750 who was leading another faction of university and street and creek militant groups. 138 00:17:59,750 --> 00:18:06,500 That's amongst them included prominent I Gather members. 139 00:18:06,500 --> 00:18:09,830 So having carefully explained that relationship, 140 00:18:09,830 --> 00:18:20,780 it will come as no surprise to you to learn that after the announcement of the amnesty and the ways in which these 141 00:18:20,780 --> 00:18:32,570 former militants were reincorporated into the structure of the oil economy and awarded contracts for security, 142 00:18:32,570 --> 00:18:40,640 here is a thick tome that former militant warlord being installed as a traditional ruler of his community, 143 00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:50,570 and it will come as no surprise to you that attack at home is today at the grand patron of I Gather. 144 00:18:50,570 --> 00:18:56,350 So these kind of factions are linked and lined up. 145 00:18:56,350 --> 00:19:04,450 So masquerading this, for example, concerns that kind of coding of youth as a political category is cult boys, as militants, more generally as youth. 146 00:19:04,450 --> 00:19:11,050 And I gather, captures and defines exclusion in marginality of youth as socially disadvantaged, 147 00:19:11,050 --> 00:19:15,270 hounded by the police excluded from normal reproductive relations. 148 00:19:15,270 --> 00:19:24,970 This drug use as clients of militant leaders. They sing praise songs for Osama bin Laden, as well as remembrances for cancer. 149 00:19:24,970 --> 00:19:33,310 We were and others. And like gang performance around the world, whether it concerns spirit, possession, dancing or singing these events, 150 00:19:33,310 --> 00:19:40,930 this verandas puts it open up social spaces where tenderness, humour, hope and solidarity intermingled with everyday tragedy. 151 00:19:40,930 --> 00:19:46,180 So I gather sings about love and loss in the city, about commercial sex workers. 152 00:19:46,180 --> 00:19:52,840 They sing about women who refused their advances until they work, until they say that they work for show, 153 00:19:52,840 --> 00:20:05,030 and they sing songs like this one and bemoan the inability to marry and the loss of girlfriends in the metropolis on doing that. 154 00:20:05,030 --> 00:20:12,760 In my mind, over in the. I mean, am I doing good? 155 00:20:12,760 --> 00:20:25,520 Fog is running. Received by the BBC, but it is air there that they had a little fire right in their body, 156 00:20:25,520 --> 00:20:33,670 but that these are you bizarre to all of us and by two or four minutes of quality or by the me? 157 00:20:33,670 --> 00:20:38,000 But he did not rule out any rational thought they were probably into. 158 00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:50,150 So within performances that a kind of hyper masculine projecting all kinds of images of a kind of militant youth, 159 00:20:50,150 --> 00:21:01,670 these songs kind of contain a sort of laconic humour that undercuts that kind of machismo that reveal 160 00:21:01,670 --> 00:21:11,750 a vulnerability to losing girlfriends and to losing fights and to getting lost on life's course. 161 00:21:11,750 --> 00:21:15,200 These are songs also that sing about oil here, 162 00:21:15,200 --> 00:21:26,320 about Ogoni land where political elites organised as mafia as Italians become anxious about popular protest. 163 00:21:26,320 --> 00:21:52,680 Like. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 164 00:21:52,680 --> 00:22:00,810 I am. I am. I am I so. So these histories of youth masking intersect with oil politics. 165 00:22:00,810 --> 00:22:06,030 They're about this kind of performance of construction of youth often displayed as kind of in hyper masculine context, 166 00:22:06,030 --> 00:22:10,710 but with this laconic, insecure lyrical accompaniment. And in recent years, 167 00:22:10,710 --> 00:22:23,070 both the music and the imagery of I gather often fans idolatrous kind of performative trope has been adopted by youth within popular culture. 168 00:22:23,070 --> 00:22:31,560 More generally here in Harrisons Arab Banko, which is one of the biggest hits of 2017, 169 00:22:31,560 --> 00:22:43,680 where in the video he's performing with, I gather here flavour, who is the kind of darling of the Igbo speaking world. 170 00:22:43,680 --> 00:22:59,370 He talks about fusing rap into organic again is the music that goes with I Gather and more recently here, which is kind of incredible. 171 00:22:59,370 --> 00:23:14,670 His recent single, which is kind of masks, meat, Black Panther meat, Afrobeats, Colaba, OK, we don't need any more than that. 172 00:23:14,670 --> 00:23:27,360 OK, but let me just close with a conversation that's been emerging between this kind of popular street genre and pop music that goes with it, 173 00:23:27,360 --> 00:23:36,330 and more formal artistic interpretations of of masking in work. 174 00:23:36,330 --> 00:23:46,230 Like this chagrin, Ascend used to work on an oil rig, but he's now become a kind of a leading light in the Port Harcourt art world. 175 00:23:46,230 --> 00:23:52,680 And his 20 09 work face like I Gather, 176 00:23:52,680 --> 00:24:02,850 which is supposed to try to capture the sense in the blue of being possessed by the spirit and the external image of it. 177 00:24:02,850 --> 00:24:09,360 But also, and this is what I wanted to get on to the photographic and video installation work of Zena Saro-Wiwa. 178 00:24:09,360 --> 00:24:13,350 So Xena is the daughter of the murdered Ogoni rights activist, 179 00:24:13,350 --> 00:24:19,680 and she's converted her father's former office in main town Port Harcourt into the city's only art gallery, 180 00:24:19,680 --> 00:24:28,350 where she promotes local artists and is engaged herself in what's been described as a kind of playful examination of folklore, 181 00:24:28,350 --> 00:24:33,420 food Nigeria and popular aesthetics, religion and masquerade. 182 00:24:33,420 --> 00:24:39,810 And so this is a series called Men of Ojeleye. In 2014 were Ogoni. 183 00:24:39,810 --> 00:24:48,990 I gather groups will get organised, the music and the kind of metal gong that accompanies the mass performance, 184 00:24:48,990 --> 00:24:52,530 and they're going to be in Ogoni society. 185 00:24:52,530 --> 00:25:01,380 That, I gather, was introduced in the 80s and 90s, she describes as a masquerade full of wit, personality and swagger. 186 00:25:01,380 --> 00:25:06,480 It's a kind of very self-conscious revisiting of self representation here, 187 00:25:06,480 --> 00:25:13,500 of laying down a kind of inverting the rules of masquerade through lying down stripped clothing. 188 00:25:13,500 --> 00:25:21,060 Powell has written about how these images display a very vulnerable masculinity, 189 00:25:21,060 --> 00:25:28,200 while Sahrawi was the historical and political circumstances of it just beneath the surface. 190 00:25:28,200 --> 00:25:38,850 She also plays with the idea of gendered exclusions of masking by carving and performing around masks she's excluded from get it herself. 191 00:25:38,850 --> 00:25:43,620 So this work and this series of photographs is displayed as part of the major 192 00:25:43,620 --> 00:25:48,120 exhibition called Disguise Masks and Global African Art and the Seattle Art Museum, 193 00:25:48,120 --> 00:25:57,090 and it travelled around and just to impress upon us the relationship between youth masquerade and oil. 194 00:25:57,090 --> 00:26:05,730 The following year, she followed this up with a five stream video installation called Correct Boat Pipeline Correct Babies in Ogoni Mask, 195 00:26:05,730 --> 00:26:11,970 not an imported mask. Like, I gather if you ever see video of this. 196 00:26:11,970 --> 00:26:18,960 Correct. My mask is absolutely incredible acrobatics and they've got these very long horns, these antelope horns, 197 00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:26,400 and they have to do somersaults, which is really, really hard when you've got another couple of feet on the top of your head. 198 00:26:26,400 --> 00:26:36,600 So her film? Which on our show demonstrates the kind of these performances over the remnants of the oil industry. 199 00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:42,090 A wellhead and abandoned flow station exposed pipeline here, 200 00:26:42,090 --> 00:26:48,060 a mosque that performed to make to mark the changing agricultural seasons and emphasise the 201 00:26:48,060 --> 00:26:57,240 relationship between human animal physical environments a reprinted against the landscape of oil. 202 00:26:57,240 --> 00:27:04,590 So to conclude, oil is brought Port Harcourt into new postcolonial global circuits and has witnessed 203 00:27:04,590 --> 00:27:10,770 the emergence of new aesthetic strategies and creative responses to ecological crisis. 204 00:27:10,770 --> 00:27:15,690 These strategies seem quite varied when we look across multiple genres of the visual and performative arts. 205 00:27:15,690 --> 00:27:20,850 Much contemporary documentary photography is dystopian in its aesthetic. 206 00:27:20,850 --> 00:27:29,280 While most popular music celebrates accumulative excess, but perhaps the ideas of enchantment and disenchantment are not persuasive when 207 00:27:29,280 --> 00:27:34,290 thinking about represents what representations of oil because they offer a choice, 208 00:27:34,290 --> 00:27:45,150 but because of the necessity of embracing both positions, contrasting celebration and critique, pleasure and pain being enthralled and appalled. 209 00:27:45,150 --> 00:27:51,180 The critical ambivalence seems quite pronounced in some of the work from and about Port Harcourt. 210 00:27:51,180 --> 00:27:59,970 Yellow Yellow is drawn into a life of privilege, success and achievement through relationships with oil contractors and politicians. 211 00:27:59,970 --> 00:28:05,310 And it's this big ailment that leads to her physical undoing and compels her to 212 00:28:05,310 --> 00:28:09,990 abort her pregnancy so that she doesn't give birth to a child like herself, 213 00:28:09,990 --> 00:28:12,870 a born throw away, a shallow pickin father. 214 00:28:12,870 --> 00:28:20,790 And it seems to me also that the celebration of youth aesthetics captured in Sahrawi was work offers a rather 215 00:28:20,790 --> 00:28:28,050 different and more complex engagement with the politics of oil and some of the more explicitly protest oriented art. 216 00:28:28,050 --> 00:28:31,980 Supporting these images of spiritual, otherworldly, 217 00:28:31,980 --> 00:28:39,870 natural enchanted qualities of masked bodies gain their potency because of the contrast their relationship with the landscape 218 00:28:39,870 --> 00:28:49,200 scarred by rusting pipelines marked by the symbols of international capital that are loaded with a history of protest and violence. 219 00:28:49,200 --> 00:28:51,900 Perhaps it can be argued from ethnographic work on agaves, 220 00:28:51,900 --> 00:29:00,120 songs and from these visual reinterpretations that it's important to recognise the critique of the Nigerian social fabric, 221 00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:09,870 which the arts will present that are powerful precisely because they arise from the projection and performance of disadvantage and disempowerment. 222 00:29:09,870 --> 00:29:19,800 Because they capture the attention and politics of youth, not as victims or vanguards, but in terms of vulnerability across ethnography and the arts. 223 00:29:19,800 --> 00:29:25,140 Then we arrive at questions of vulnerability, the vulnerability of embodied existence. 224 00:29:25,140 --> 00:29:30,870 The butler relates the precariousness of social interrelation and interdependencies, 225 00:29:30,870 --> 00:29:38,460 and the vulnerability that positions human bodies in the path of forces in things oil infrastructure. 226 00:29:38,460 --> 00:29:40,311 Anthropocene.