To Life! by Weintraub Linda

Author:Weintraub, Linda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Bright Ugochukwu Eke |

Shields (installation) |

2005–2006 Thousands of used and discarded plastic water sachets | Dimensions: variable

Photo: Bright Ugochukwu Eke /

Courtesy Bright Ugochukwu Eke

Bright Ugochukwu Eke |

Shields | 2005–2006 Parade/performance | Dimensions: variable

Photo: Bright Ugochukwu Eke /

Courtesy Bright Ugochukwu Eke

Eke conveyed that the toxic effects of rainwater impinge on the entire community by fabricating enough gear to completely fill the exhibition space — 120 coats and 60 umbrellas. When the work premiered in Senegal, the raincoats were suspended from the ceiling and hung on the walls of the gallery, and the umbrellas were scattered on the floor. Shields has assumed different configurations in shows in Nigeria, Germany, Algiers, and Greece. Eke added a community component in Lagos by involving local residents in the labor-intensive process of fabricating the coats and umbrellas. He explains, “My idea is about the connection with people, the societies/cultures, and the environment, how one affects the other. So I will not feel fulfilled even when I can do the work all alone.”11 Community members paraded through the streets wearing the coats and holding the umbrellas, a public demonstration of the blighted state of the source of life on Earth.

For Eke, packaged water, raincoats, umbrellas are all symbols of the barriers contemporary humans erect to protect themselves from their surroundings. He ponders such issues by commenting, “We have continued to produce and consume a lot of toxic and dangerous chemicals that cause the deterioration of the Earth: water and air pollution, deforestation, acid rain, endangered species etc. simply because we do not care. I just wonder why it is in the nature of man to be ruthless, and I am afraid he does not seem to be scared of this impending ecologic crisis.”12

Eke poses three questions on his blog: “Who am i? Who is the Other? Where is the meeting point?”13 His answers are implied by breaking two rules of written English. First, he uses the lower case to write the word I, which diminishes the significance of the individual. Then he capitalizes the word other, which augments the stature of other humans, other species, and other forms of matter. I has not always been capitalized in the English language. Significantly, capitalization emerged at the same time as capitalism — when Britain and the United States became world powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like the capital I, the economic construction of capitalism endorses private ownership, private investments, private property, and private profits. While the comforts and conveniences generated by these systems are enjoyed by many, Eke directs attention to the stresses and risks they also engender. He comments, “It is high time we changed our notion of ‘Modernist individual freedom’, which only meant freedom from community, freedom from obligation to the world, and freedom from relatedness.”14 Eke offers a poignant confirmation of the ethics of ecocentrism, the belief that suppressing the dominant self can avert many environmental calamities and social inequities.

Eke sums up his artistic enterprise by noting how water reestablishes bonds between individuals, cultural traditions, community, resources, and habitats: “Water is a universal medium.

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