I (body) migrated from Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S. (space) in 2013, arriving with a fragile and intimate archive of three physical photographs (object) of myself (memory). 

Working across painting, collage, sculpture, text, installation, sound and movement performance, curation, and cultural facilitation, Villager explores questions of culture, identity, consciousness, and belonging. The transdisciplinary practice, self-termed as Afrosensiotics in 2023, considers how we are shaped by what we inherit, experience, remember, and sustain—and by what remains fragmented, forgotten, refused, or erased. Villager expands this experience of displacement through their Yorùbá sensibility passed down from my ancestral lineage and my contemporary African experience in the diaspora.

What if home is made to be found, again and again?

Across these works, VILLAGER explores migration, material memory, Yorùbá knowledge, and belonging through a visual language that moves among abstraction, figuration, and collage: “I reexamine what it means to be shaped and transformed by tradition: what we sense, experience, know, remember, and sustain.”

Circular forms become portals and traces of memory: structures for passage, departure, return, and imagined futures. Layered color, woven marks, scarred surfaces, and recurring cowrie shells give those questions physical form.