Lisa Parks visits Temitayo Ogunbiyi

Introduction by Lisa Parks

Temitayo Ogunbiyi is a mixed-media artist currently based in Lagos, Nigeria. Moving between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, her work responds to and builds dialogues between global current events, social histories, technological systems, and botanical cultures. Her art practice investigates systems that capture, mediate, and direct the movement of people and matter, whether playgrounds, plantlife, or surveillance networks. Her work is guided by the principle of play and raises questions such as: How does play function as a useful mode of exploration and critique? What does it mean to play? Where can we play? In 2018, she built her first functional playground, appropriating conventional household items and construction materials to create a non-prescriptive play space. Tayo has made four functional playgrounds to date, including projects in Naples, Italy and Lagos, Nigeria. Her artwork has also been exhibited at an impressive array of galleries in Paris and Lyons, Berlin, London, Perm, Poznan, Dakar, Capetown, New York, and Jogja, Indonesia. Further details about her exhibition history can be found on her website: https://temitayo.com/

As a Digital Earth fellow, Tayo has undertaken research on surveillance technologies and created a series of new works, entitled Cookie Calls. In the process, she has read and been inspired by books ranging from Ruha Benjamin’s Race and Technology to Simone Browne’s Dark Matters to Tung Hui-Hu’s A Pre-History of the Cloud. She has investigated digital technologies such as packet sniffing systems, traceroute applications, and cookies, and has queried infrastructural materialities in her midst. Throughout, the concepts of play and cultures anchored in Nigeria and beyond have undergirded her conceptualization process. For instance, when imagining the thick entanglement of cables that connects a Lagos data center to the world, Tayo sketches them as a weaving of botanical lifeforms including moringa and papaya that thrive near and in relation to the Nigerian facility. When thinking through the processes of online tracking and monitoring she turns to baking and cookie recipes to generate a playful assemblage of puns, cooking algorithms, and edible materialities.

All the while, Tayo’s work confronts the racial politics and Western constructs that often dominate technological imaginings. By considering the “Planetary Sensorium as a monitoring structure birthed from Western constructs,” Tayo investigates “how play can subvert and highlight its pervasive surveillance systems.” At a high level, her project is focused on building a play space from Lagos, informed by its inhabitants’ individual stories, their use of digital technologies, the surveillance mechanisms embedded therein.

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Dark Chocolate Young Coconut Dollop Cookies on a Plate (in pixels), 2021.  Digital photograph.

This first photograph depicts cookies that Ogunbiyi regularly makes with readily available ingredients in Lagos, Nigeria. Key ingredients include fufupowder (cassava flour) and the young coconut flesh that she sources from Badagry. The chocolate chunks are cut down from 1kg bars of Carnival chocolate, also produced in Lagos. These botanical products are combined with nutmeg, vanilla, and cinnamon—staple spices across West Africa and the Caribbean. Such edible cookies inform her project Cookie Calls. Coupled with digital cookies--those used to track the choices of internet users, the project investigates whether nourishment and knowledge can be generated despite questionable intentions.

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Decidedly more ‘grown up’ in flavor. 2021.  Cropped screenshot of “Chocolate Molasses Cookies”.  Recipes and Cooking Guides from the New York Times – NYTimes Cooking. https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019806-chocolate-molasses-cookies

These recipes are submissions the artist received in response to her project Cookie Calls, which she conceived of and developed during her 2020-21 Digital Earth Fellowship.  These hand-written recipes, Molasses Cookies and Ginger Cookies were submitted by OO and MO.

For the project, Ogunbiyi requested recipes from her communities and hosted a series of conversations that develop from these recipes and cookie walls, which invite users to opt into digital trackers distributed from the host website.  The idea is to use language to uncover biases of participants and encourage a better understanding of oneself, the violent and delicious histories that botanicals can mark, and the knowledge structures humans choose to exist within, those on which they depend, and those yet to be discovered. 

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, New Private Equiano Subsea Cable (Google spelled Goolge).  Cropped screenshot.  Submarine Cable Networks. https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/euro-africa/equiano/goolge-unveils-equiano-subsea-cable.

Researching the information Cookie Calls could potentially carry, Ogunbiyi continually returns to the physical infrastructure through which the internet and its surveillance mechanisms operate. Google Inc. plans to insert Equiano, a fiber optic cable, in Lagos and not far from where the artist lives. The cable is named after an enslaved man who was purportedly Nigerian, and is described as having purchased his freedom. One would be naïve to believe that this cable is innocently commemorative. Immeasurable exploitation of the named individual’s distant relatives is the more likely outcome. Returning to the consumption of edible cookies and the consumption by digital cookies, what can be fed to these extractive infrastructures as acts of resistance and freedom.