Goethe Institut Nigeria, Sahara Centre Train 12 Creatives on Art Space Negotiations

Goethe Institut Nigeria and Sahara Centre recently organised the Art Space Projects Presentation and Exhibition for 12 young Nigerian creatives drawn from different disciplines especially artists, architects and photographers after six months of rigorous trainings on art Space negotiations which took place in some parts of Lagos. 

The team also produced the first-ever tool kit which will help future creatives on how to either negotiate or renegotiate spaces in different parts of Nigeria and make them religiously, economically and socially viable. 

The initiator of the idea, Kolawole Oludamilare, a Programme Coordinator at the institute and Coordinator of the Arts Space Negotiation Project, said what inspired him was when he discovered many art spaces closing down, especially the African Arts Foundation, “and some spaces that I knew when i was coming into Lagos, art spaces that are free, and art spaces that you can create. I saw these art spaces closing down and other major research showed that we don’t have what ought to have creative spaces. Of course, there was this pressure on spaces that are not making immediate profits to close down. We started thinking of how to creatively think about the art and the space in a way that we will in some few years in Lagos tackle the issue of art desert spaces. If you look at all of the communities in Lagos except the Island, art spaces are not part where we originally built our communities. You see churches, mosques, beer parlours, car wash spaces, you see every other space but you don’t see an art space. 

“As a worker here (Goethe Institut), when foreigners come and they ask where can we screen this or where can we do this? We can only mention a few places, they really want to go into Lagos and experience of course  because they hear a lot about the arts in Nigeria. They want to come and experience and unfortunately there are no spaces to host all of these spaces that they hear about. So that is the idea behind this project of negotiating spaces because we know that we can compete to get spaces. How can we negotiate to make sure that the idea of art space doesn’t go into extinction in Lagos.” 

Speaking on criteria for selection of fellowship members, he said though new to everybody, “we are looking for a creative way to address the issue. So we picked from architects, arts entrepreneurs and artists. The idea of space is what some governments and private organisations are now putting into their programmes because nobody thought about state space before now. We wanted a diverse creative society.

“The art space project started around 2022, an artist from Glasgow came into the country and was mapping out art spaces in Lagos. He made a very interesting discovery, he said Lagos is twice as big as London but has far less art spaces than we have in London.”

Dr. Adun Okupe, a member of the Advisory Board of Sahara Centre, said collaboration was the future of what spaces can look like.