A ‘Soft and Spiritual Way’ The Restrained Dreaminess of Isabel Okoro’s Normatopia

In response to the violence Black people around the world routinely face, Nigerian photographer, Isabel Okoro has been situating her work in what she terms ‘normatopia’. A normatopia is normal, not perfect; a middle ground between the harshness of reality and the dreaminess of utopias.

The first time I meet Isabel Okoro is in the lobby of her apartment building in Toronto, Canada. It is mid-April 2022 and I have commuted 40 minutes on the Toronto Transit Commission’s subway line to pick up her then-newly released book, Friends In Eternity. The exchange is brief, and she tells me thanks for the purchase, as I cradle the text in my hands. I respond that I am looking forward to thinking with it. The purchase and interaction buoy me home with enough excitement that it almost makes up for the wintry chill and the long ride back.

I had only just begun to follow Okoro’s career. While we had briefly attended the same high school in Hamilton in Ontario, we had never spoken. I barely knew of her and likely would not have noticed her work till years later were it not for a recommendation from my cousin on a trip to Halifax, a few months prior. I had been bemoaning my lack of awareness of any interesting Nigerian artists in the diaspora. A literary lover all my life, I was somewhat well acquainted with what books to read and which authors were doing interesting work, but with visual art, I was a neophyte...