Sheila Chukwulozie defines herself as an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneously fixed and fluid, object and subject, matter and spirit, digital and analog, able and unable, and native and migrant. She imagines a future where performance, physiotherapy and technology meet at a powerful junction to upgrade the current definition of healing. By juxtaposing local rituals, modern technology, and traditional myths, her artist practice explores the body politic of “behaving oneself” in a Catholic-colonial body. She is drawn to exposing the internal and consistent dialogue which is coded through discipline and punishment, and through language like “conscience”, “moral compass” and even, “The Holy Spirit”.
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Sheila Chukwulozie is working with Uzoma Chidumaga Orji. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Countering hegemonic notions of linear time, dominant since the industrial revolution, the artists resist technology that places ancestral thought as second class and instead show how ancestral and deep time informs everyday encounters. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology which can inform a planetary conversation on technological futures.