Uzoma Chidumaga Orji is a creative technologist and visual artist from Owerri, Nigeria. As an artist he observes and then creates representations of society and of history as visual metaphors that unpack his millennial Igbo Nigerian cultural context and explore post-colonial crises of identity. As a technologist he is interested in how digital technologies can be used as tools to access ancestral truths in the present day. He lives and works between Abuja and Lagos, Nigeria.
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“In our bodies, we work from the perspective of an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneous: fixed|fluid, object|subject, matter|spirit, digital|analog, able|unable, and native|migrant. By juxtaposing local rituals, modern technology, and traditional myths, our practice as a duo interrogates what rests unseen or unheard whenever an Other asks that one “behave oneself” in a post-colonial body.”
Uzoma Chidumaga Orji collaborates with Sheila Chukwulozie. They 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.