LIFE IS GETTING CONFUSING AT THIS POINT KEVIN-ADEMOLA SANGOSANYA

Artistic process

I have been led to question my identity and my relationship to embodied life experience: the sense of belonging as a bicultural and Black person in a White social context, the quest for self, transcendence. This very impulsive and visceral approach to creation led me to the design of maps or mind maps as my final work. The work becomes a representation of the unfolding of an intellectual path. This approach, very intimate and introspective, led me to develop a visual identity where repetition and superposition have an important place. Of French and Nigerian (Yoruba) origin, I will graduate in December 2019 with a degree in tropical agronomy from the ISTOM (school of engineering in agro-development, Angers). Fascinated by botany, I specialize in my last year in Tropical Plant Production before leaving to do my internship and thesis in Nigeria where I will work on the reforestation and conservation of forest species in the country with IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture). Questioning the relationship that human beings have with other living beings and the narrative that they construct for themselves (through culture, folklore, beliefs and value systems) to justify their dominant place in the world is an avenue on which I am focusing my work. It passes, on the one hand, by giving a voice and highlighting the world of plants: the communication with them, their different architectural models, their life cycle, the ecosystem services that they render, their place in our spaces, the links that the human groups maintain with them, their personification... On the other hand, this involves highlighting the parallel between the erosion of biodiversity caused by the current globalized capitalist economic model and the erosion suffered by non-Western cultures as a result of neo-colonialism and the arbitrary hierarchization of cultures imposed by colonialism. I would like to show how these oppressions stem from the same matrix of thought that justifies economic, racial, cultural, gendered and speciesist dominations. This aspect of my approach, even if it potentially concerns all non-Western cultures, involves a reappropriation of my Yoruba language and culture and of my place in the social space as a person who defines himself as Black: This aspect of my approach, even if it potentially concerns all non-Western cultures, involves a reappropriation of my language and culture, a study of folklore and traditional Yoruba ethnobotanical relations, a decolonial rewriting of Yoruba history and of the evolution of human relations to the natural environment through the ages, a de-enslavement and de-primitivization of Black cultures and figures in the representations and in the collective imagination. .. These interconnections between environments and human cultures are the guideline for my current work.

Kévin-Ademola Sangosanya