Type: Performance Art
Artist: James Notin
Location: Ibadan
Keywords: Necropolitics, Nigeria, Silence, Artistic intervention.
Where is the head of state is a sequel in the Too much to chew series. The focus of the piece is on the gestures of the Nigerian government to issues affecting daily citizens. In recent times, the actions of the three arms of government have reinforced the belief of many in the failure of Nigeria as a state. The performance will closely utilize public opinion collected from polls to create a spectacle of absence and challenge participants to act.
If silent is connotative of death, a break or nothing. When this is observed in politics, it heralds several forms of negligence, mediocrity, nepotism, sectarianism and so on. While collating opinions of the public on the politics of Nigeria, the silence which in some periods came as some sort of intermission is what we have been experiencing. The silence seems to illuminate the socio-political and economical state of Nigeria.
The government of the country itself has over the year utilised silence and silencing as a form of controlling the masses. Of such recent case is the EndSARs movement of 2020, Igbo genocide or civil war as it is called, erasure of history from educational syllabuses. Having in three attempts to present the opinion of the people, this performance is another invitation to an artivism space. To a space where reality is distorted that it (reality) can be obsessed, curious angered about.
