In this conversation, Nigerian artist Ayobami Ogungbe and Rele Communications Specialist Lindokuhle Nkosi reflects on his multidisciplinary practice rooted in collage, photography, and textile traditions. Through a deeply personal lens, he explores the philosophical and political significance of weaving, the quiet power of grayscale tones, and the complex intergenerational memories of his hometown, Badagry. In dialogue with fellow artist Terrick Gutierrez and the diasporic context of Los Angeles, Ogungbe speaks to the possibilities of art as both document and intervention, where single images become part of a multiverse of stories, and where the domestic becomes a site of both excavation and care.
LN: Your practice involves the transformation of archival photographs into new, layered compositions through collage and weaving. These are not just visual reconstructions, but tactile interventions, works that require the labour of the hand. Can you speak to weaving not only as a technique, but as a philosophical or political gesture? What does it mean to you to craft memory, to turn fragile paper into textile, to literally thread narrative into form?
AO: So a little context into weaving as a practice, or at least what it means for me personally. I was born in Badagry, and I’m from there too. Badagry is quite well-known historically; it was a major slave market during the transatlantic slave trade, from around the 14th to the 18th century.
It’s also a coastal town, and because of that, there’s a long-standing tradition of weaving. The people have always woven; woven through pain, woven through survival. We’ve made baskets, mats, bags. Anything that could be made from the materials found along the shoreline. So weaving was always part of daily life, part of the environment I grew up in.
I was constantly surrounded by people weaving jute bags, fishing nets, mats, baskets. It wasn’t something distant or symbolic; it was a lived practice. It wasn’t new to me, and I know it didn’t start with me either. It’s something that’s clearly been passed down through generations.
When I began re-engaging with my hometown and looking for ways to tell its story through photography, weaving stood out as a natural and powerful visual language. It just made sense, it felt right, to bring that element into my photographic practice. So, yeah.
LN: In Process + Place, your work is presented in dialogue with Terrick Gutierrez’s, two practices shaped by different cultural legacies, but both grounded in the emotional geographies of home. Was there anything in the proximity of his work that helped you see your own differently? Did the contrasts reveal anything personal or surprising, about space, about masculinity, about the ways we both carry and construct memory?
AO: Yeah, so when I first met Terrick, we just hit it off instantly. The conversation wasn’t even about our work, we were just talking about life. About our experiences growing up.
I shared what it was like growing up in Badagry, and he told me about his experiences growing up in LA. And even though the contexts were very different, there were so many similarities. So many things I could relate to in his story, and vice versa.
We both approach these stories from a place of empathy. He’s focused on preserving the memories of the buildings he grew up around, and I’m thinking about how we’ve also preserved many of our own colonial buildings in Badagry. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does open up important conversations about the social impact of those structures; what they represent, and how we continue to engage with them in our everyday lives.
What stood out to me was that, for a long time, we weren’t even talking about art. We were just having a real conversation – human to human – about memory, place, and experience. And eventually, that naturally transcribed into our practice. It was such a beautiful exchange.
LN: You’ve said that the black-and-white palette in this body of work functions metaphorically. These greys feel almost like thresholds, neither fixed nor neutral, but quietly shifting. What emotional or psychological atmospheres are you working to evoke through this tonal choice?
AO: Yeah, the tonal choice is very metaphorical. I was trying to draw attention to the mundane things in our lives. The things we rarely notice but that are always there, quietly shaping us. They influence our decisions, our perceptions, how we move through the world, but because they’re so ordinary, we often overlook them. We just accept them, like background noise or static.
But if we step back, pay attention, and start asking questions: why do we do this? What’s informing our behaviour? What’s behind our habits? Then maybe we can start uncovering answers. Maybe we can begin to shift the way we think and approach long-standing issues in our societies.
The “greys” in my work represent these overlooked norms. The things we’ve accepted as normal without questioning. As a society, we often think we’ve already figured out the “black and white”, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s clear. But the grey areas, the in-betweens, are just as important. They hold complexities we’ve brushed over.
So the grey is a metaphor, a call to interrogate the everyday, the assumed, the things hiding in plain sight. There’s a lot to uncover and potentially to heal, if we start looking there.
LN: There’s a quote by photographer Duane Michals that reads, “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing… Image-makers deal with the eternal.” In your practice, do you consider yourself more an image-maker than an image-taker? What kinds of truths or temporalities do you believe the constructed image can hold that the captured image alone cannot?
AO: So, for me, a photograph is a record of memory. Something someone captured so that others who weren’t present can still access that moment. That’s really how I see it. I don’t think of my work as being “better” than a single image. In fact, it’s built on single images. My process relies on them. Each individual photograph plays an essential role in shaping the larger narrative. They’re very important to me because, within the context of my work, they contribute deeply to holding everything together.
The story of my hometown is complex. It’s layered, intertwined, and full of overlapping memories. It’s not something that can be fully captured in one single image. That’s why I work in series, because I’m trying to show that the questions I’m exploring don’t have simple answers. They’re multifaceted, and they demand a nuanced way of looking.
What happened in one place might explain what happened elsewhere. One memory can ripple into many outcomes. Sometimes, two or more events converge to shape a single result, or even multiple results. It’s like a multiverse of memory. A multi-timeline. That’s probably the best way to describe it.
So, the photographs I make are fragments of memory, of places, buildings, people, all tied together in the larger story I’m trying to tell about my hometown.
LN: Much of your work engages with the domestic: spaces of familiarity, care, and inherited tension. When you re-enter these spaces through your images, are you attempting to preserve them, reimagine them, or perhaps re-inhabit them in a new way? How do you negotiate the personal stakes of excavating such intimate terrain?
AO: Yeah, I approach it as someone who’s still learning, always learning. And that mindset brings a kind of humility to how I engage: with the questions, with the medium, and with the stories I’m trying to tell.
It keeps me from making assumptions. It allows me to connect more honestly with the place, not just acting as though it belongs to me or as if being born there means I have all the answers. I still ask questions. I stay curious. I want to understand the full context of the spaces and the people, beyond just my own perspective.
A lot of these stories have been passed down from generation to generation. So re-engaging with them from a personal point of view means coming to them as if I’m encountering them for the first time, not relying only on what I already know. That approach serves the work better, I think. It allows the town and its people to be represented more fully, because so much has been happening long before I came into the picture. That’s really how I try to move through it.
LN: Travelling to Los Angeles for this exhibition placed your work in a new cultural and spatial context. Did being in LA, physically and visually, open up any new questions or connections for you? Were there points of resonance, discomfort, or discovery that shaped the way you thought about your work in relation to the African diaspora more broadly?
AO: Yeah, so one of the first conclusions I came to about LA was that, on the surface, it feels a lot like Lagos. There’s an immediate familiarity to it. And in terms of the African diaspora, I really felt a connection, like we’re going through similar things, even if the contexts are different. That shared experience creates a kind of common ground.
It’s something that’s made it easier for people in LA to engage with my work. They understand what I’m trying to say, because in many ways, the situation mirrors their own. Just like I mentioned earlier in my conversation with Terrick, the resonance is there. So yeah, I think that sense of shared reality helped people in LA connect with the stories I’m telling.
Ayobami Ogungbe’s work is currently on view as part of Process + Place, a two-person exhibition at Rele Los Angeles, running through 8 June and presented alongside artist Terrick Gutierrez.
