Synopsis:
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Blazing Century-1 is the first installment of a ten-part art project entitled Blazing Century by Wilfred Ukpong, a Nigerian-born interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and practice-based researcher. Each series of Ukpong's Blazing Century - BC1 to BC10 - is site-specific and set within a geographical location often embroiled in socio-political and environmental issues.
​This body of work - developed between 2010 and 2021 - deals with the contemporary social issues facing the Niger Delta of Southern Nigeria. Once a major producer of palm oil for British colonizers, the Niger Delta is considered the mainstay of the Nigerian economy for its large oil reserves and its rich biodiversity due to the presence of rivers, mangroves, freshwater forests, and marine estuaries. In recent years, the region has been at the center of environmental and social justice campaigns, challenging the pollution caused by significant spills and flares at the hands of oil and gas industry giants.
Over the years, the region has been impoverished and historically distressed with decades of political corruption, inadequate infrastructures, community disputes, youth restiveness, unemployment, and more than fifty years of environmental degradation and pollution. Driven by a profound desire to effect change, the artist worked with more than two hundred young people from marginalized, oil-producing communities to collectively address the historical and environmental issues in the oil-rich region. The resulting photographs, sound, film, and culture powerfully reference local rituals, ceremonial motifs, and symbols interwoven into a complex future cosmology.
​For the artist, these activities are ethical-social imperative and critical emergency responses to social conditions in the impoverished oil-rich region. Ukpong creates new narratives of the Niger Delta with visual metaphors and fantasies to propose alternative futures and generate conversations on troubling issues grounded in the heavy-weight political demographics.
Utilizing aspects of Afrofuturism and mysticism, artist Wilfred Ukpong creates compelling and poetic reflections on the crisis of environmental degradation and exploitation in the Niger Delta. Drawing on historical and personal archives, ecology politics, and indigenous environmentalism, his work demonstrates how artmaking can be used as a tool for social empowerment and to confront continued, aggressive colonial practices. Through a futuristic lens, Ukpong underscores the need to understand the detrimental impact of this extreme extraction on both people and land.
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Blazing Century Studios Nigeria is an art institution specializing in creative development, research, training, mentorship, and presentation. The space provides the physical basis for multidisciplinary works/practice in the realms of arts, film, photography, design, performance and sound/music. It facilitates a collaborative and enabling environment for students and artists, filmmakers, designers, music composers, and technicians to engage in meaningful projects that foster socio-cultural and economic development, as well as environmental consciousness and change.