Fellows

an afrikan poet cries at the wind - Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó

an afrikan poet cries at the wind, 2020 © Afopefoluwa Ojo

Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó ( Nigeria )

An African Poet Cries at the Wind is an attempt at creating a reading economy for african poetry outside of the structures and hierarchy of publishing and curation that inherently influence reading behaviours.

Using a database of poems scraped from the internet (or creating a database from an open call), the project will use a mailing list to randomly send out one poem a week to subscribers. The work primary focuses on readers, not meaning context or style, but rather tries to create a channel for curiosity around the different kinds of poetic works that have been created by Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.

The project will materialize as a full autonomous system, built with python running on a raspberry pi, that will store poems in a local database and send them out programmatically to subscribed users. An additional web application will also be developed to enable subscriptions as well as displaying the poem of the week.

Subscribe at poems.africa.

This residency is part of the Lagos-Berlin Program organized by the Goethe Institute Lagos in cooperation with Galerie Wedding, 16/16, ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik and Savvy Contemporary. 

an afrikan poet cries at the wind, 2020 © Afopefoluwa Ojo