Nigerian Nostalgia Project 

A White Space, Lagos, Nigeria

October 8-25, 2012

 

 

As curator for the Nigerian Nostalgia Project exhibition during LagosPhoto 2013, I organized the installation in collaboration with the founders of the social media platform. 

 

The Nigerian Nostalgia Project is an online digital archive of collected photographs comprised of images, video, sound bytes, press clippings, publicity stills, and various ephemera depicting scenes and people in Nigeria between 1960 and 1980. The project is based on Facebook, where users upload their personal archives for collective viewing. The project currently has over 15,000 members.

 

The ambiguous photographs create a mosaic-style of portrait of Nigerian society at the cusp of independence and cultural transition. The Nigerian Nostalgia Project fills the gap of a visual history of Nigeria constructed on a grassroots and individualized scale. Images that have lost their intimate relationship with the viewer begin to take on new meanings when commented upon by the thousands of participants on the site. New connections are made, personal reflections build upon one another to reconstruct the image’s context, and a collective cultural consciousness is constructed in community discussions. 

 

While the choice to restrict images to before 1980 reflects a conscious aim at engaging a pre-digital culture, the success of the project rests on the viability of social media as an interactive communication platform.  The exhibition at LagosPhoto marks the first time that the project has left the confines of Facebook and entered three-dimensional space. Intimately scaled prints cover the walls of the exhibition venue to form an encapsulating mural.

 

An experiment that explores the translation between virtual and real-time interactions, the Nigerian Nostalgia Project installation at LagosPhoto aims to forge connectivity and dialogue through the social fabric of vernacular photography.