paper tigers
November 12th 2023
In parallel to Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern there’s a stunning survey of contemporary African photography, A World in Common. The range and quality of photography is inspiring but contrarily it's an installation that struck me. The tile is the clue. A History of a City In a Box by Ndidi Dike triggers a bunch of ideas for me and the realisation of the concept is powerful.
The starting point is a collection of documents, dating from colonial and early independence administrations found in an abandoned government building in Lagos. Dike’s installation fills discarded file boxes designed to protect and conceal information with those documents and surrounds them with sand and soil to build a form of scale model of the city of Lagos..
“Information is one of the greatest currencies in Lagos. Information is hidden and buried. It is un-accessible to the people, and only permitted to those in power.” Ndidi Dike
A History of a City in a Box, 2019, Ndidi Dike
The power of official paperwork and process as an instrument of the state against the individual runs deep through literature and film. Subverting and transforming the materiality of that power over citizens into a rendering of the city itself is a great stroke of insight.