Home Is…

Through portraiture, staged tableaux, and costuming, I use photography to explore and invoke rituals of home and home-making. My project Home Is… (2017) takes the form of performance-based, large-scale color photographs created outside of, yet in relationship to, my home in Nigeria.

Created in Germany, this work borrows from Düsseldorf’s colorful carnival, a celebration held just before Lent, to enact a performance of home rituals. This process became a way to root myself deeply in that new space. I explore identity and belonging in a foreign land, asking how we cultivate a sense of home where non-belonging is prevalent, how we find psychological contentment and acceptance, and whether we are destined always to yearn for what is absent. I have come to see home as a space we carry within and invoke when necessary.

The carnival’s dominant colors, red and white, mirrored those of my Yoruba heritage, where red represents Sango, embodying passion and vitality, while white signifies Yemoja and peace. These colors gave form to the varying emotions I navigated. I incorporated candies distributed during the carnival as a peace offering within my photographic performance.

These echoes in practice across cultures revealed a profound connectedness, a thread of relatedness that my photography seeks to trace.