Everyone has a swim story. Yet too often, those told by the black protagonist usually end in tragedy. Without the requisite access and teachers, many simply never learned. And when tested, the only outcome is to pass or fail, swim or sink.
In the last ten years of my artistic practice, I’ve had the privilege to excavate a different type of swim story. Triumphant stories of swimmers and lifeguards from Accra, Abuja, Lagos, Dakar, Philadelphia and Harlem. Stories beyond survival -- stories of community, learning, teaching, togetherness and play. In my attempt to capture the representative group and individual portraits, my paintings have moved from abstraction to realism, spilled over into poems and performance, been experienced through documentary film and immersive installation. Each perspective adds to the complete story.
And so, I call myself a multi-disciplinary artist, though I have a penchant for drawing, colorfully. I often lay on the floor, ink pen pressed to paper, and I feel like I’m journaling. As I torch sections of my canvas with fire, I reminisce of childhood memories in post-genocide Rwanda. I think of how much Rwanda’s story has changed, just in my lifetime. In the portraits of my muses, I project my own histories, hopes and reminders. I often think of the story of my own country. In fact, much of my artistic practice is focused on what Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei refers to as a “patriotic worrying” about Nigeria. In Synchronized Swimmers, the aesthetics of orientation and alignment— or lack thereof— reflect the musings of my mind. I think of Chinua Achebe’s “falling apart” of structures. The tension between order and entropy, the past and future of a nation. As Nigeria ‘reclaims’ the post-colonial, post-war narrative, I wonder, do we revert to ancestral culture or do we borrow wisdom from other countries?
When I began my art career six years ago, I started by investigating the structure of Nigeria’s educational system in art form, with the belief that in order to do things differently, we must see them differently on a macro level. On a microlevel, my works often revisit the story I create about my own educational journey- whether I am creating the change I wish to see, in myself and in my broader community of artists, national citizens, and diasporan family. Using the swimming ideology for personal education and personal education as a conceptual pillar for community building, my works continue to ask, what would it take for us all to swim, to win?
Modupeola Fadugba, 2020
