Joana Alarcão: For my first question, can you give us an overview of the project, Iyapo Repository, the inspiration behind it, and how Octavia Butler's character Lilith Iyapo influenced the project vision?

Ayodamola Okunseinde: Yeah, so the Iyapo Repository it's a speculative project about a museum that exists in the future that collects African artifacts from their past.

In a sense, they are collecting African artifacts from our future. So, in the way that we understand cultures of the past by looking at artifacts of the past, we could understand cultures of the future by looking at artifacts of the future. And the way that this is done is through a collaborative workshop session, where participants are given cards and a manuscript.  The cards are shuffled and they get to interpret what they got. So you could get different domains about the environment, about the political situation, about the object, about the subject, and they have to create or unveil an artifact from the future. That artifact is put into manuscript form and then it's somehow prototyped either by the participants or by the repository.

The project takes its name from Lilith who is a character in Octavia Butler's xenogeneic Dawn book. Lilith is the last character that exists, the last human that exists. In a sense, we talk about Lilith as an in-between–between the past and the future. So Octavia Butler influences a lot of the repository and a lot of other projects of mine. 

There's a hope, right? It's not pessimistic. There's a struggle to sort of reconcile how the difference between what has been and what's coming, but the challenge of moving into this new space which Lilith Iyapo takes on, and she's able to deal with that. In a sense, the repository bearing her name takes on that ability to straddle between the past, the present, and the future.

Iyapo Repository combines both digital and physical artifacts, as you explained. How do you see the interplay between these mediums contributing to the project mission and impact? 

Bethelihem Gebresilasie: The archive has had many iterations. I think before we were able to collect everything and put it on the website, we only had physical iterations. At the moment, it is able to reach more people through its digital iteration. This is not its final iteration. However, I think that having all the material from the workshops and all the artifacts easily accessible to people is one way that people can actually connect with the mission and learn about it.

And the other factor is that I think that having it digitally makes it easier to scale and also contribute to the world. However, I think we're going to have, hopefully, an actual location for it to be and for people to come in and actually reach it.

So, I think it's able to fulfill the mission by making the practice of futuring possible for different kinds of people and also its products accessible to different kinds of people because a lot of our world has transitioned to a digital world. However, that's not the only and final way it's going to be possible for it to be revealed to the world.

Ayodamola: I love that answer because I think it takes on the sort of practical side. I want to take on a sort of conceptual answer to that. And bear with me, because I'm gonna bring in some of my research in the sense that one could draw a comparison or an analogy between the digital and the digital being virtual, right? The idea of spiritual being virtual as well. In the sense that these two places hold memories, they hold spirits, they are analogous and in the same way, they're analogous here, the way one accesses them is analogous in the sense that you need a physical, the arrangement of materiality that one could constitute as technology, a type of ritual, a social context.

So if you think about a church to be able to access that spiritual aspect of it, you need all that materiality to be able to grab memories and talk to spirits. So, in the same way, the virtual spiritual aspect or the virtual technological aspect of the Iyapo Repository, which is a digital space, has the potential to hold memories and to hold spirits and it's through the assemblages of building these artifacts and having rituals around them, having people encounter them, that they're able to access those memories as well. So, I think the question of the digital and the physical can be addressed in the sort of practical sense as Beth alluded to, but more conceptual sense as well.

Your project operates along the principles of imagination, creation, reclamation, and preservation. Can you explain how these principles shape the contributions and the overall narrative of the repository? 

Ayodamola: With this articulation of imagination, creation, reclamation, and preservation, one could see it maybe as a linear trajectory of people in the workshop doing things, but we don't necessarily want to think about it just linearly. It could also come at different times, because the effects of these activities, in a sense, don't have to happen at the time that the workshop is going on. 

The workshop gives the ability to dream using speculative design to sort of think about or imagine beyond the practical, or beyond the prosaic. Once people are able to break out of those confines, then the idea of creation is making and thinking about what is learned through making versus what is learned through saying, or what is learned through reading. There's a different epistemology to when one makes something, there's a different type of knowledge that's produced and that knowledge is connected to ideas of liberation for blackness. Which some folks might call Afrofuturism, but we don't want to think about it in terms of Afrofuturism, but more in terms of reclaiming spaces in the future, reclaiming spaces and recontextualising the past, but also reclaiming spaces in the present. And this is, when I say space, I'm talking about political space, I'm talking about geographical space and also space space. And then the idea is that through all of this with the making, there's a codification of certain ideas in the making, or certain knowledge is in the making that's held by the object. And then that object to be able to transmit that information into the future has to be taken care of and has to be preserved - ideas of African artifacts and the fact that they are not just aesthetic objects. They are imbued with some type of power and one could think about these objects that we're making as being imbued with that same type of power that need to be reconsecrated or needs to be ritually applied to be able to transmit the information that they have into the future.

I think that these aspects talk about the project in two ways, if we split it down as the narrative of the project, but then also the practical nature of the project. The narrative of the project as I've described, all of these elements help to sort of codify knowledge and objects that transmit information into the future. In terms of the practical it applies to the workshops, and it applies to the participants of the workshop. 

How do the workshops and collaborative sessions within Iyapo facilitate the creation of artefacts that reflect the diverse Afro-futuristic visions? I understand that Afro-futuristic vision is not really the word that you would like to use, so can you share some memorable outcomes of the sessions or tell us more about how these sessions and these workshops work? 

Ayodamola: So I don't like to use Afrofuturist because it presupposes a growing problem in the future, or that the solutions are in the future and Martine Sims would argue that one should also focus on the present, right? And there's a mundanity to the present that can be addressed with this type of thinking. Also futurists don’t necessarily think about the past. 

Also, this idea of futurism, when we talk about how does this reflect the diverse vision? It is inclusive of the Afrofuturist vision, but it's also inclusive of the pessimist vision. It's also inclusive of visions of the future that we don't ... let me put it this way.

I don't know whether you've been to a county fair where they have a jar of beans and they say "Count it" and then if you get the right answer, you get a present. But then you give a guess and it's off. But if 1000 people guess and then you take the average of that guess you get right on.

So the idea is that through this workshop, we're getting an average in a sense of all the different ideas of black futurity. As a result of that, it moves away from being something that is brought about through from the top down, to something that's thought about collectively from the bottom up. As a result of that, all the different types of notions of what futurity or Afro futurity, reclamation, Afro-pessimism, or whatever term people use and the way they think about it is reflected in the output, because it comes from this collective work. And then there's something else about having this collectivity, that we can relate to each other's ideas and thinking, it also reflects an anxiety about the present.

So at some point, if we are tracking artefacts or the manuscripts, we should be able to see how it's, in a sense, a collective notion of blackness and futurity, how that changes, at least in the local space that we're analyzing. Also, if one applies this globally, then you could see that the way Futurity is thought about in America, in Black America, might be different from the way that Futurity is thought about in Nigeria.

So, given enough time and enough collective work, one should be able to map out these different sides.

Bethelihem: You can also talk about your work with Recess.

Ayodamola: Yeah. So I am always interested in asking people to think about their futures. We had a project with Recess Assembly where instead of going to jail, young people had to go through this workshop and it was a prison diversion program. And we had a participant come through and we asked them to create an object of the future. And what they drew was a shoe. A sneaker and we asked and they said," Oh, this is a sneaker I want to buy next week". So they weren't able to sort of go beyond the prosaic, they weren't able to go beyond a week. But for them, that was their future. So that also is inclusive in this idea of black futurity, right? And what we had to do with them was sort of work with them to sort of expand the horizon of their dreaming. To be able to consider far beyond.

And I think it was really striking because at that moment we realized that a lot of people are not given the space to dream, like society confines them. And thinking about the power of this project, if able to stretch out that confinement, to give people ways to think beyond.

So, when we say reclamation of space, that's part of what we're talking about. 

Do you hold the workshops in a physical location? How can people be included in these workshops?

Ayodamola: Yes, they are in a physical location. Usually in a museum or in a gallery or some sort of residency. So there's a question about how do we scale or do we even need to scale? Right? That's tied to who these workshops are for. So, because it is a project about building black futures, in the workshops, how do we say that? Is it only black people that are allowed to do the workshop? And if so, how do we say, "oh, you're black, you're not black". There's a challenge of thinking about who makes this future and who's allowed to make this. But then the future is also created by everybody. It's not just by black folks. So we're still trying to figure out what language or how to even talk about that aspect of it. And that's been one of the considerations when it comes to making the project accessible, the workshop accessible online.

So we were actually considering having a workshop component of the website where you could make those cards, but then we thought, how do we manage the people that are producing it? Luckily, we haven't had any negative manuscripts. We haven't had any trolls. But that's a possibility as well. I think we have one actually, one troll in the archive, but that's a possibility as well. And so we're still trying to figure out what it means to have access to the repository and who should have access to the repository. But I think that regardless of who has access to it, it still serves as an inspiration.

I try to think about it akin to Octavia Butler's books, where she is writing about her own future, from her perspective, it's very helpful for blackness. But it doesn't preclude non-Black participants from gaining some sort of knowledge or some sort of benefit from it.

So, I hope I'm not going too far in sort of putting this in the realm of an Octavia Butler project that serves on different registers for different people. 

In the context of addressing contemporary anxieties such as police brutality and ecological crises, how does the Iyapo Repository serve as both an archive and a tool for social inquiry and resistance?

Bethelihem: One way we've been, connecting with this question is thinking about the ethics of creating certain kinds of technology and how we want to go about doing that. We live in the same world, so we know that a lot of the tech that we have now may not be as healthy for the world, both for the people using it and for the earth itself.

But we also want to think about how we can make technology rooted in compassion, not just for human beings, but also for everyone inhabiting this earth. So keeping these ideas of how we want to create and the effect of that creation on the rest of the world has been, I think, one way we are thinking of engaging with the question that you're asking as well.

So with the relaunch of the project what new directions or themes are you excited to explore and how do you plan to engage the community in this new phase? 

Bethelihem: Yeah, this is my turn. So we've had a lot of meetings where we try to allow Iyapo to germinate and I think right now it's kind of reaching down its roots and trying to figure out where to place them and figure out where it can grow. So we have different ideas for all the ways that can grow and branch out and see what it can do.

However, we're still figuring it out and that figuring out process has been going well. So I feel very confident in seeing how this kind of baby is coming into the world. And I can't say anything for sure because, again, we're still, reaching out and trying to figure out where we can place our roots and where we can nourish ourselves and nourish the world around us. However, it's going well.

We've reached out to different kinds of organizations. We've found organizations who are also thinking about nurturing society's imagination to think beyond what we have now or what we could think that we can do. So that has been going well. Right now we're also figuring out how we can organize ourselves and how we want to connect with each other. What kind of organization would be more sustainable for the practices we want to do and for ourselves as well? We have so many different ideas! It’s all still in process, but it's a good process to be in.

Joana Alarcão: It's always a space of a lot of ideas where we get to organize ourselves and see how the project goes and where we can fit each other.

Bethelihem: Yeah, I've been going to different organizations in New York City, there's this organization called art. coop and they have a lot of office hours and help different people develop organizations or different ideas that they have in the arts. I've been going to a lot of those and that has been really beneficial to the development of Iyapo and what I want it to be and what we want it to produce for the world.

So now for the questions more about care. So the concept of care is central to your project, and I saw a lot of ramifications within the project. But how do you plan to explore and prototype new worldviews and relation dynamics around care through your archival and creative practices?

Bethelihem: I think that creating the space where new worldviews are possible with less confines. As I have said previously, there's also a way for people to feel less anxiety and less trepidation or hesitation with what's to come. It is also a way of dismantling the kind of agitation you might feel about what's possible and what's not possible. And for that to happen in a space where it's not immediately happening, but it is happening in a space that you can control in some way, I think allows people to also feel cared for.

So for my last question, what message or call to action would you like to leave our readers with?

Bethelihem: I wanted to say that if you are listening to this and want to play with the archive and see what we have available our website go to IyapoRepository.org and we have different ways of sifting through the archive in different categories that you can click on and see what comes up for you.

All images courtesy of Iyapo Repository.

Cover image:

Prototyping Workshop, August Wilson Center 2017