Queen Idia’s Air: Saturation, Conditioning and Power
WiSER and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of London UCL warmly invite you to the fifthseminar of our new online seminar series
Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres
Ruth Sacks will speak on
Queen Idia’s Air: Saturation, Conditioning and Power
Click here for paper
This paper embraces what reading for air can bring to a narrative of how a 16th century portrait of Beninese Queen Idia came to be a Lagos icon. I explore how more airy understandings of artworks can expand existing art historical texts in order to enter the contemporary African city. Likenesses of the royal matriarch, who lived in the early 1500s, have been fashioned in Benin tradition since her time. Queen Idia is depicted as a powerful deity who commands both natural elements and European traders, symbolically rendered in the crown of ocean symbols she customarily wears. I contrast how her ivory portraits are held in major museums in New York and London against her appearance in 1977 Lagos as an Afrofuturist icon. In a city already teeming with more-than-human beings, the giddy atmosphere of FESTAC ‘77 (an iconic African cultural festival) encourages the possibilities of engaging with the politics of air. From the hermeneutic sealing of artworks in air-conditioned museums, which cuts off their breath, to the weathering of those buildings Lagos allows to remain standing, Queen Idia’s portrait opens up the potential of how humans perceive their shared environment. I draw on the atmospheres of fiction centred in Lagos (Nnedi Okorafor, Wole Soyinka and Teju Cole) to consider the ways a portrait of a warrior queen can illuminate apparent and invisible ecological contamination.
Ruth Sacks (https://ruthsacks.net/) is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose first monograph, Congo Style: From Belgian Art Nouveau to African Independence, was published by Michigan University Press in 2023. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), Visual Art Department, and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), where she obtained her PhD. Sacks has exhibited widely as an artist, with recent exhibitions including Style Congo at CIVA Museum & Archive, Brussels.
Monday, 22nd April 2024
4pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here
The series is convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Megan Vaughan (IAS).
Recent work on infrastructures, atmospheres and the biospheric shifts associated with conditions of the Anthropocene have relied on rendering newly vivid those aspects of the social which have long been treated as background. Sensory ecologies - affective or experienced space which compose environments, in Matthew Gandy’s terms, are synesthetic: like sounds, they reverberate within human and more-than-human subjects. Affective atmospheres are shared bodily situations, drawing also on renewed and shifting elemental understandings of air and refracted light. How can we come conceptually closer to the toxicities of both air pollution and rising authoritarianisms, to material and metaphoric atmospheres – and other less-than-visible carriers of damage? And to a better sense of the entanglements and relationalities that such modes of thought can produce? The growing non-transparency of air, in Sumana Roy’s terms, produces paranoid reading: suspicious, anticipatory theories of negative affect. This occurs in the context of the ‘disappearance of air’ in favour of mask filters, air purifiers and the AQI (Air Quality Index) for those who can afford it. Yet there may also be a reparative range to these questions: making air explicative might offer analytic opportunities for sustenance and responsiveness to what is to come.
The Series will run fortnightly on Mondays @ 4-5pm JHB time/3pm London time. It will build on ongoing and emergent academic attention to air and atmospheres and draw out suggestions for future research and for ways of acting upon the contemporary air and atmospheric crisis,