jeyifous rehearses the long run by way of speculative utopias
For Olalekan Jeyifous, the long run is just not a distant horizon however a parallel situation: one which exists beside the current, ready to be visualized. Skilled as an architect however working fluidly throughout set up, illustration, and public artwork, the Brooklyn-based artist and designer has constructed a follow grounded much less in fixing issues than in reframing them. His work doesn’t suggest masterplans or mounted outcomes. As a substitute, it operates within the fertile terrain of hypothesis, the place design turns into a story gadget and utopia a technique of inquiry.
‘I consider quite a lot of these speculative tasks as present within the now, however in an alternate actuality,’ says Jeyifous, describing a follow that collapses temporal boundaries and situates chance inside the current tense.
This insistence on the ‘now’ is essential. Jeyifous’ visions, dense, vibrant, and infrequently infrastructurally inconceivable, should not escapist fantasies. They’re counterfactuals, deliberate reconfigurations of social, political, and environmental techniques that reveal the contingencies of the world as it’s. Whereas speculative design typically leans dystopian, Jeyifous positions utopia as a productive counterbalance, not as a naive perfect, however as a vital technique. His tasks don’t ignore disaster. Many are formed by local weather change, displacement, and systemic inequality. But they refuse the inevitability of those situations, proposing as an alternative different trajectories grounded in group resilience and cultural specificity.
portrait by Matt Dutile
speculative design as spatial storytelling
Jeyifous’ work is usually described by way of the lens of Afrofuturism, however its operative logic is architectural. Drawings resemble elevations and sections. Installations learn like fragments of imagined cities. But not like conventional structure, these tasks don’t aspire to be constructed. They’re, as he has frames it, a means of ‘utilizing design as a instrument for creativeness fairly than drawback fixing.’
Rising from an early engagement with architectural illustration, his follow has expanded to incorporate collage, animation, and large-scale public works, every medium chosen for its capacity to hold narrative. By way of this expanded toolkit, Olalekan Jeyifous constructs layered worlds which might be without delay acquainted and estranged. Lagos is rendered as a vertical patchwork of casual settlements. Brooklyn is reworked right into a community of climate-adaptive micro ecosystems. Speculative infrastructures mix vernacular ingenuity with futuristic know-how.
These environments should not impartial. They foreground questions of entry, fairness, and belonging, issues rooted within the spatial politics of the Black diaspora and the lived realities of cities present process fast transformation. His work persistently returns to the connection between structure and energy, inspecting how constructed environments encode techniques of exclusion whereas additionally holding the potential for collective reimagination.
Jeyifous imagines: the NY Institute of Aetherism & Alchemy’s Division of City Biotopes & Phytomechanics
jeyfous employs Utopia as vital instrument
In tasks like ‘Nairobi 2081 A.D.’ and ‘Shanty Megastructures,’ casual structure turns into a web site of innovation fairly than deficiency. Excessive-rise constructions clad in salvaged supplies, punctuated by vegetation and photo voltaic techniques, invert dominant narratives of improvement by embedding technological development inside native contexts. Reasonably than imposing a homogenized, glass and metal futurism, these works counsel that the long run can, and should, emerge from the textures and histories of place.
Equally, with ‘Bodega Ecohaven’, Olalekan Jeyifous reimagines Brooklyn as a community of self-sustaining microclimates, the place group infrastructures evolve in response to environmental pressures. Bubble farms, rainwater harvesting techniques, and energy-generating flora type a speculative ecology that’s each fantastical and grounded in present applied sciences. Right here, utopia operates not as perfection, however as a rehearsal, a means of testing how totally different techniques may coexist. This strategy aligns with Jeyifous’ broader understanding of design as a cultural and political act. His work challenges viewers to think about relationships between artwork, politics, in style tradition, and the cultural imaginary, positioning the long run as a contested area formed by competing narratives.
Nairobi 2081 A.D., illustration for the lookbook of the Ikiré Jones Trend Assortment, Vigilism, 2013
between public area and the imaginary
Whereas a lot of Jeyifous’ follow unfolds in speculative imagery, it additionally extends into bodily area by way of public artwork and installations. Initiatives like ‘Crown Ether’ and ‘The Growth and the Bust’ translate his thematic issues into sculptural type, partaking audiences in shared environments and embedding speculative considering inside on a regular basis expertise. These works typically function as what is likely to be referred to as ‘utopian fragments,’ partial manifestations of bigger imagined techniques. They don’t try to totally understand the futures depicted in his drawings. As a substitute, they create moments of encounter that invite viewers to inhabit, nonetheless briefly, another spatial logic.
This oscillation between the imaginary and the fabric is central to Jeyifous’ methodology. By shifting between illustration and realization, he resists the binary between artwork and structure, utilizing every to tell the opposite. Speculative photos achieve weight by way of their connection to real-world contexts, whereas constructed interventions purchase new layers of which means by way of their affiliation with imagined futures.
‘Crown Ether’ at Coachella 2017 | picture courtesy of Olalekan Jeyifous
imagining the phrases of the long run by way of different presents
At its core, Jeyifous’ follow is anxious with who will get to think about the long run, and the way. His work challenges the dominance of Western, technocratic visions of progress, proposing as an alternative a multiplicity of futures formed by numerous cultural views and lived experiences. That is notably evident in his engagement with cities like Lagos, which recur all through his work not as websites of deficiency, however as laboratories of chance. By centering these contexts, Jeyifous disrupts standard hierarchies of improvement and reframes informality as a supply of innovation.
Utopia, on this sense, turns into much less about arriving at a perfect state and extra about increasing the sector of what could be imagined. It’s a methodology for questioning assumptions, exposing inequities, and articulating options, a mind-set by way of design fairly than merely designing options. In a second marked by overlapping crises, Jeyifous’s work provides a special type of optimism, one that’s grounded in complexity, attentive to historical past, and open to contradiction. His speculative worlds don’t promise straightforward solutions. As a substitute, they invite us to think about that the long run is just not one thing to be predicted or managed, however one thing to be collectively authored, one picture, one narrative, one chance at a time.
