Having thrown a stone in the present day, Eshu kills a hen of yesterday. The Yoruba proverb tells each a narrative of reparation and of ancestrality by joyfully bending spacetime conventions and accessing topics from the previous with current actions. The saying provides a poetic entry level to broader West African traditions and to the observe of Scottish-Nigerian artist and architect Dele Adeyemo. Named one of many winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Subsequent Practices Awards, Adeyemo’s work brings collectively ecology, spirituality, dance, and territory, inspecting how embodied cultural practices can generate various spatial potentialities inside and in opposition to the structure of racial capitalism.
Born in Nigeria and raised in the UK, Adeyemo has been visiting Lagos for a few years. Via this engagement, he has developed an in depth physique of analysis on collective motion practices that predate capitalism and provide distinct, usually imaginative spatial intelligences working alongside dominant methods. ArchDaily spoke with Dele about his creative and pedagogical practices, and the way he identifies design sophistication the place architects usually understand deficiency.
Arguing that masquerade and different types of embodied choreography arrange house, he describes dance as a bridge between materials and religious worlds, connecting the seen and the invisible. On this interview, Dele displays on the ecological pressures generated by city progress, the contradictions of racial capitalism, the lifeworlds of coastal communities, and the way these dimensions converge in his creative work.
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Romullo Baratto (ArchDaily): You have been working in Lagos for fairly a while now. May you talk about this long-term engagement and the way it frames your work?
Dele Adeyemo: My curiosity in Lagos started personally. I am Nigerian, grew up within the UK, and I’ve been returning for a few years. Initially, my curiosity was nearly touristic. Like many within the diaspora, I discovered myself documenting road life, markets, and on a regular basis areas, making quick video clips of those moments. However regularly that curiosity developed right into a extra methodical architectural inquiry.
My PhD centered on Africa’s city transition extra broadly, with Lagos as one in every of its key case research. Via that analysis, and notably via relationships with artists and dancers, I started to entry elements of the town I won’t in any other case have encountered. I used to be invited into lagoon-side communities, particularly Oworonshoki, and it was via these interactions that my understanding deepened.
What grew to become clear is that these communities are entangled with indigenous lagoon practices, like fishing, sand filling, subsistence economies, but in addition with wealthy cultural traditions. Dance, for instance, will not be merely leisure; it’s a type of community-making. Masquerade will not be merely efficiency; it’s a religious observe that connects folks to the earth, to ancestors, to intergenerational data. Via participating with these communities, I started to see that the lagoon is not only a geographic function. It’s an ecological, social, and cosmological lifeworld shaping how house is produced and inhabited in Lagos.
RB: Your analysis focuses on what you name the Black Radical Spatial Imaginary, tracing the contours of Black social life and its actions. May you please clarify this idea?
DA: Earlier than talking in regards to the Black Radical Spatial Imaginary, it is vital to situate it throughout the thought of the Black Radical Custom, an idea developed inside Black research and articulated most clearly by Cedric Robinson within the e-book Black Marxism. The Black Radical Custom, at its core, acknowledges that radical politics — anti-colonial politics, liberation struggles, resistance to racial oppression — are embedded within the cultural practices of extraordinary black folks. In different phrases, radicalism will not be positioned in principle alone; it’s positioned in on a regular basis life.
After I communicate of the Black Radical Spatial Imaginary, I’m extending that concept into the realm of house. I’m suggesting that on a regular basis black cultural practices don’t solely produce politics — additionally they produce house. They generate spatial types and areas of liberation.
In my analysis, I find this spatial manufacturing in dance and embodied motion. In Lagos, what I name the Black Radical Spatial Imaginary emerges via collective motion: dance gatherings, efficiency, ritual. When folks come collectively in these embodied practices, they aren’t merely occupying house; they’re shaping it. They create areas of enjoyment, solidarity, and social engagement, usually in areas marked by extractive city improvement or infrastructural neglect.
However these practices will not be solely modern responses to city precarity. They’re rooted in a for much longer family tree. They carry ahead cultural logics that predate colonialism and capitalism. Within the context of Lagos, the Black Radical Spatial Imaginary names the methods by which embodied cultural practices, particularly dance, generate various spatial potentialities inside and in opposition to the structure of racial capitalism.
RB: Your venture Wey Dey Transfer operates on the intersection of fast city progress in West Africa, ecological disaster, and pre-colonial religious practices. How do these layers converge in your work extra broadly?
DA: Maybe it is useful to strategy your query via an instance: Within the movie Sinners, there is a second when a personality recounts a painful story below situations of racial oppression. As he speaks, grief escapes his physique as a form of cry, a uncooked, nearly involuntary sound. That cry transforms into rhythm. In that second, we witness one thing just like the delivery of the blues.
What pursuits me there may be that the sound exceeds the violence that produced it. It’s not merely a response; it turns into a transmutation, resistance. And blues, as we all know, will not be solely music — it’s religious, soulful. It connects to a type of intelligence past the purely rational or seen. That gesture that transforms grief into rhythm and collective expression is central to the Black Radical Custom. It’s about accessing data past the tangible. It’s a cosmological relationship: a connection between the fabric world and forces that exceed it.
Via my very own engagement with Yoruba heritage and religious observe in Lagos, I’ve come to know that aesthetic practices, like dance, are exactly about creating this bridge between worlds. Dance connects the fabric and the ancestral, the seen and the invisible, the dwelling and the spirit. It’s via that bridge that society and house had been traditionally organized in pre-colonial West Africa.
Colonialism and slavery didn’t destroy this information. They had been suppressed, enveloped by the colonial plan, however they didn’t disappear. As West African cities modernized, these cosmotechnical practices had been absorbed into city life. They persist inside it. In Lagos, modernization plans, whether or not colonial or modern, function below the idea that changing into a megacity requires erasing these different modes of organizing life. In actuality, these modes live on, and so they usually undermine the ontology of racial capitalism. They produce methods of organizing society that aren’t primarily extractive.
That is the place city enlargement, environmental stress, and cosmology converge in my work. Take the lagoon-side communities: Structure there may be not produced via speculative planning or profit-driven improvement. It emerges from collective ritual practices, like fishing, sand mining, efficiency, and masquerade. These practices type a parallel financial system, working alongside however not reducible to the formal financial system. Structure, on this context, will not be imposed from above. It coalesces from motion.
Once we take a look at the lagoon, the mangroves, city enlargement, and religious cosmology, they aren’t separate layers. They’re entangled motion methods. And from their entanglement, totally different spatial potentialities emerge; potentialities that exceed the extractive paradigm of racial capitalism.
RB: You counsel that dance organizes house. Is it doable for these embodied choreographies to function at a scale that challenges standard city planning practices?
DA: The query of scale is all the time troublesome. Capitalism consistently asks: how can this mannequin be scaled? That is the entrepreneurial logic. However the Black Radical Custom doesn’t function that approach. It’s not about producing another hegemonic system. The truth is, what makes it highly effective is that it isn’t centralized or managed by a singular authority.
As designers, we are sometimes educated to assume when it comes to top-down group. However what if the work is to not impose a mannequin, however to acknowledge what’s already occurring? In West Africa, motion tradition — dance, efficiency, gathering — is a mass phenomenon. It’s not marginal. It responds on to the wants and situations of on a regular basis life. These practices already arrange house. They already generate social infrastructure. The problem is that formal improvement usually undermines these actions. Giant-scale city tasks incessantly erase the communities and spatial practices that maintain them.
So the problem will not be whether or not embodied choreography produces house — it does. The problem is how you can design in relation to it, reasonably than in opposition to it. Collective motion establishes territories of belonging, rhythms of gathering, modes of circulation, and types of social coordination. It produces spatial order — however not via a grasp planner. It emerges relationally.
This isn’t a speculative future various. These practices have existed since pre-colonial occasions and proceed in the present day, even throughout the megacity. The query is whether or not we will acknowledge them as authentic spatial intelligence, and whether or not architects are keen to work with that intelligence as an alternative of displacing it.
RB: This intelligence appears to collide straight with extractivist logics which have subjugated a lot of the International South for hundreds of years. In that sense, might the lagoon and its ecology provide a counterpoint to the extractivist manufacturing of house?
DA: I see the town as the results of innumerable motion rituals coalescing and synchronizing. A technique of understanding the city surroundings is thru the singular perspective of capital. However there may be one other strategy to see the town: as the end result of numerous entangled actions. Some are deliberate by capital; others emerge from on a regular basis life.
Urbanists would possibly describe these as circulation methods. Others would possibly communicate of metabolism. Henri Lefebvre spoke of rhythmanalysis and the manufacturing of house. What I am suggesting is that dance is a crystallization of a few of these rhythms. It makes seen the embodied patterns via which house is frequently produced.
In Lagos, what turns into notably clear is how central casual actions are to the lifetime of the town. The truth is, they’re important not solely to city life, however to capital itself. Capital accumulates wealth via formal channels, however that accumulation is dependent upon monumental quantities of casual labor.
Take Oworonshoki, the lagoon-side neighborhood I have been working with for a number of years. It preserves lineages of pre-colonial group via dance and subsistence fishing. These practices enable folks to exist partially exterior full capitalist incorporation. But throughout the identical neighborhood, residents additionally have interaction in artisanal sand mining. That sand feeds straight into the development business and speculative actual property improvement. The developments that depend on their labor are sometimes the very ones that threaten their displacement. In a way, the system consumes itself.
That is what I imply by racial capitalism. From its origins, capitalism has relied on types of labor positioned exterior its personal formal constructions, on exploitation inside casual economies. With out these zones of extraction, the formal financial system can’t perform. The high-value merchandise of the developed world rely on uncooked supplies and labor acquired at extraordinarily low value elsewhere. In Lagos, this interdependence is spatially seen. The exploited our bodies, the exploited ecologies, and the infrastructures of accumulation coexist throughout the identical geography. Modernization guarantees improved dwelling requirements, however its mechanism is exploitation. So after we ask whether or not the lagoon provides a counterpoint, I might hesitate to border it as an oppositional system. Slightly, it reveals one thing elementary: capitalism is dependent upon methods of being that it neither totally comprehends nor controls.
From a modernist perspective, we are likely to consider that establishments, equivalent to colleges, courts, prisons, and ministries, produce society. However in West African cosmology, society was traditionally organized via ritual efficiency and embodied social relations. These had been the establishments. In that sense, dance will not be merely expressive. It’s infrastructural. It produces neighborhood and house.
This can be a totally different spatial paradigm. It doesn’t search to exchange the dominant system with one other centralized construction. It persists alongside it. And since it can’t be simply managed, state establishments working inside colonial planning logics usually understand it as a menace.
The lagoon, then, will not be merely a counterpoint. It’s a reminder that different spatial intelligences live on throughout the coronary heart of the megacity.
RB: Dance is clearly central to your analysis, however your observe additionally engages movie, drawing, sculpture, and set up. How do these different artwork types relate to your work? Are they merely representational, or instruments that actively form your inquiry?
DA: My installations are deeply impressed by the fabric tradition of West Africa, notably Yoruba tradition. It’s a very wealthy creative custom. My curiosity, nevertheless, will not be merely formal. I am drawn to the artifacts that help and embody motion rituals: masquerade masks, divination objects, and fishing applied sciences. These will not be merely aesthetic objects; they’re cosmotechnical units. Their design encodes each a motion observe and the cosmology that underpins it.
Take the divination board — the ọpọ́n Ifá — for instance. Historically, it’s a carved picket tray full of sand (iyẹ̀rọ̀sùn). The bàbáláwo performs divination by inscribing marks into the sand whereas reciting verses of the Odù. It’s a ritual observe for navigating uncertainty, accessing ancestral data, and decoding the situations of the current. What fascinates me is that this centuries-old observe incorporates a extremely subtle binary system — a type of computation embedded inside ritual. It’s, in a way, a machine for accessing data past the fabric dimension.
After I design installations impressed by the ọpọ́n Ifá, I’m not merely referencing its type. I’m participating its cosmology. I’m asking what it means to deal with house as multidimensional, as one thing that connects materials actuality to ancestral, ecological, and religious data. Below capitalism, land is diminished to a commodity. It’s one thing to be divided, owned, traded. But when house is known as multidimensional, then the act of drawing arbitrary property traces on a plan begins to really feel profoundly insufficient.
Movie, sculpture, and set up will not be secondary to the analysis. They’re extensions of it. They permit me to materialize cosmologies, to stage spatial experiences that problem the extractive ontology of contemporary planning, and to ask audiences to come across house in another way; not simply intellectually, however bodily and cosmologically.
RB: You talked about the ọpọ́n Ifá, and I believe this connects straight to a different venture of yours, The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism. May you discuss this different work?
DA: On this venture, I developed what I name a trans-cosmological cosmogram, which is basically a drawing device, an architectural instrument, designed to carry a number of cosmological views throughout the identical body. I juxtapose the Cantino planisphere — an early European map that frames territory as one thing to be captured and exploited — with spatial diagrams embedded in West African materials tradition.
One vital image throughout the drawing is the cross. In Western cartography, the cross usually means a spot marked in house, some extent of extraction or conquest. In lots of West African cosmologies, nevertheless, the cross represents the intersection between materials and immaterial realms. It marks the crossing of dimensions. Accessing that intersection requires ritual motion — via divination, via dance, via embodied observe.
That is exactly what colonialism and capitalism sought to suppress. If folks have entry to dimensions of existence that exceed materials management, then they can’t be totally ruled via extraction alone.
A lot of my work, then, is about recovering the which means of West African materials practices as types of resistance in sustaining alternative routes of figuring out and being. Dance and efficiency are central as a result of they preserve these cosmologies alive. And the installations try and materialize a multidimensional understanding of house — one by which the fabric, ancestral, ecological, and social are inseparable. And in doing so, they gently destabilize the extractive, planar logic via which capitalism understands land.
RB: You have lately concluded your PhD at Goldsmiths and are actually educating via the Obel Fellowship. How does your analysis in Lagos inform your pedagogy?
DA: For me, analysis isn’t purely textual. It emerges from embodied expertise, interviews, studying, and principle, but it surely should return to the physique. When analysis is reorganized artistically, via drawing, set up, movie, it requires folks to maneuver via it, contact it, inhabit it. That produces a special form of understanding: not solely mental, however bodily and even religious.
After I was educating on the Royal School of Artwork, I launched the cosmogram as a approach of mapping a website in another way. Structure college students are educated to provide website plans that mirror capitalist apprehensions of territory, equivalent to possession, zoning, infrastructure. The cosmogram invitations them to carry a number of methods of figuring out a website throughout the identical body. Every place has its personal cosmology that exceeds capitalism.
What was exceptional is that college students utilized this device in solely totally different contexts — within the UK, India, China — and reinterpreted it in keeping with native situations. It allowed them to acknowledge tensions and entanglements inside a website that may in any other case stay invisible.
Later, via the Obel Basis educating fellowship in Lagos, the work grew to become extra pragmatic. The architectural ecosystem there may be deeply oriented towards actual property improvement and short-term revenue. There may be little institutional house for various data methods. So I took college students to Oworonshoki — usually described as a “slum” — and we discovered from the neighborhood. We noticed how dance, ritual motion, fishing practices, and indigenous development methods generate spatial intelligence. Even when important infrastructure is missing, there may be a unprecedented sophistication in how social house is produced.
College students are sometimes educated to attract a boundary round a website and assume demolition inside it. Visiting Oworonshoki challenged that reflex. They started to see design intelligence the place they’d beforehand seen deficiency. Areas like Oworonshoki shouldn’t be understood via what they lack, however as reminders of what fashionable society has misplaced and continues to lose.
What’s troubling, nevertheless, is that after college students proposed tasks that protect neighborhood constructions, the Lagos State Authorities later demolished these areas. This reveals the a number of scales of wrestle concerned.
RB: The demolitions are definitely tragic; nevertheless, these cultural expressions — in Oworonshoki and elsewhere — have endured the bulldozer for hundreds of years, each materially or conceptually. In a approach, your observe is a part of that continuity. Even when the bodily neighborhood is altered or erased, the trouble to foreground its spatial intelligence resists.
DA: Sure, and I believe that is exactly why working past conventional architectural instruments turns into vital. The deeper query for me is: What sort of society turns into possible past capitalist social relations? What sort of world? What sort of existence? In West Africa, these methods of being live on alongside the megacity. They haven’t disappeared. That continuity represents potential. These practices persist, and since they persist, different futures stay doable.
This text is offered by Buildner. As sponsor of ArchDaily’s 2025 Subsequent Practices Awards, Buildner—the world’s main structure competitors organizer—helps architects get what they enter competitions for: recognition, alternative, and progress.
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