Favorites
June Crespo - Guggenheim Bilbao || 2024 || Artforum || Web
We are invited into the walls: A cutout opens to an interior full of orifices, like a surgical incision revealing organs rendered in acrylic resin, Plasticine, and latex. It’s a Duchampian peep show with a very differently inscribed body: androgynous and industrial, seen from inside.
On Binding – Notes from Venice || 2022 || Riot Material || Web
Tattered strands, a new floor. We wove a gift for us. On Rocío Molina, Eglé Budvytyté, La Biennale di Venezia — Arte and Danza, 2022.
Photography as Bildungsroman ||2020|| Riot Material || Web
On Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, Black Garden and Departure Lounge, and on pilgrimage, constructs and the inner evolution of the soul in the exterior world.
On Intimacy and Absence || 2021 || The European Graduate School || Web
On the interplay between intimacy and absence, estrangement and interconnectivity in the act of writing on intimacy with Jacques Derrida’s writings on writing and Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse
Hydrangeas || 2023 || Web
An origami garden, an aletheic world, some things you can’t share with everyone. Forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly.
Break//Breathe ||2021|| Riot Material || Web
On Rashid Johnson, Jack Whitten, Roland Barthes and Édouard Glissant; an essay in fragments on fragments.
On Listening || 2022 || Sinclètica Monastic School || Web
On Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy, Love, Music, Spatiality, Interpenetration and Relation.
Associations D’Élegance || Kinshasa || 2019 || Berlin Quarterly || PDF
On types of power, dust, l’invisible, colonialism, capitalism, sex work and intuition. Shortlisted for the Stack Magazines 2019 Best Original Non-Fiction Award.
We Are All Sentimental || Dakar || 2017 || Nataal ||WEB
On Joël Andrianomearisoa, love, and Revue Noire, a monumental art magazine from the 90s.
Versage || Nigeria/China || 2018 || Nataal || PDF WEB
Winner of the Stack Magazines 2018 Best Original Non-Fiction Award. Featured in Longreads.
All in and out of Time || 2020 || The Common || Web
// The essay, as yet unwritten, begins: Memory work is always about the present. It concludes: Now that we have done the work of remembering, we are free to do something else. //
The Ephemeral Palace || 2022 || Riot Material || Web
On walking, jealousy, the real, and Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows
Museum of Injury || 2021 || Riot Material || Web
On the canon, orality, Taoism, liberation, Museums as the physicalization of how we narrate the world, etc
The Center of the World is Everywhere || 2018 || Very Vary Veri a journal of the Harvard School of Design. || PDF Web
On Reverence and Relation || 2019 || PDF Slides Haverford Magazine Profile
Transcript and slides of a talk given at Haverford College on portraiture, reverence, the tangibility and visibility of relationships in photographs, violent and loving looking, and photography that extends past the frame into sculptures, dimensionality, silence and relation.
Asmara with the Luminaries || Asmara || 2019 || WePresent || WEB
A history of feelings, on love songs, luminosity, endurance, liberation.
Interiors|| PDF || Published in Arts and Africa || and Litro ||
On intimacies, portraiture and reverence.
Space For My Thoughts To Fly ||Nigeria||2018||Guernica||WEB
On Lagos, on my apartment, on nomadism, toxicity, and the question of home. Featured in Longform.
Streets of Goma || Democratic Republic of Congo || 2018 || The Common || WEB
Tussling with the violence of journalism and flat narratives for reality; seeking truth and photographing feelings.
Things Fall Apart || Lagos || 2018 || The Atavist || WEB
Longlisted for the One World Media Popular Feature award 2019. Featured in Longform.
Paris is Burning Goes Global || Paris || 2019 || The New York Times || WEB
On liberation, self expression, and voguing.
The Center of the World is Everywhere || 2018 || PDF Poster
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood,” – Henry Miller
The Revolution is Reclined || 2020 || Dust Magazine || Web PDF
On Alara || Nigeria|| 2017 || Moon Man Magazine || Text
An Essay on the Alara store designed by David Adjaye in Lagos.
Redemption Camp || Nigeria || 2017 || Goethe Institute, Hotspots Lagos || WEB
On solitude en masse, sacred spaces and human divinity.
Fools Gold: On Oil and its Discontents || Nigeria || 2015 || Institute of Current World Affairs || WEB
On slippery borders, friendly smugglers, secret scars, lotteries, motorcycles, artificial scarcities, legitimate hoarding, and decayed wales.
Perilous Delivery: Inside India’s Maternal Health Care Crisis || India || June 2014 || The Los Angeles Review of Books || WEB
A Profile of Malti Devi, the birth czar of small town Bihar, India.
Why Infanticide is a Problem in Senegal || Senegal || 2018 || NPR || WEB
This piece is on empathy, mostly. Also on isolation, shame, paranoia, trauma. I wrote on impossible pregnancies, victim-perpetrators and infanticide in Senegal.
India’s Other Sexual Violence || February 2013 || The Atlantic|| WEB
Women in India face violence throughout their reproductive lives. In light of recent high profile rape cases, a look at violence against women and maternal mortality.