‘We Belong to Ourselves’

On the afternoon I am to meet Chigozie Obi on the rooftop at Bogobiri, a small boutique hotel in Ikoyi, the entire length of Awolowo Road is locked in standstill traffic as is customary of Lagos. Throughout the past year, I have admired her work for its rawness and vulnerability and her, for her style and vibrance. Deeply moved by the ways her art challenges fatphobic beauty standards, similar to the essays I write, I have always felt a certain kinship in our work and I am keen to share space with her.

I arrive at the hotel finally, an hour and a half after our planned meeting and as I climb the steep spiral stairs up to the Bogobiri rooftop, I revel in its time-travelling nature, how being there always feels like stepping into another time. The walls are lined with old brown shelves interspersed with tiny sculptures and paintings. The couches are upholstered with old aso oke, lines of pale purple and blue adorning the bodies of the couch, one of which Chigozie is seated on. She rises from the seat with a bright smile on her face and gives me the warmest hug as we laugh and complain about the traffic and the general craziness that is Lagos at this time of the year.

The award-winning artist is wearing a pastel blue crop top and a khaki miniskirt with minimalist tattoos peppered along her forearms and her mouth is perpetually poised in a smile on the edge of laughter. As we meander through pleasantries, she whips out her phone to photograph our surroundings for her Instagram stories. Observing her unyielding dedication to documenting her surroundings, we begin to discuss Le Journal De Gozie, a visual diary of her daily life. She tells me: ‘I started being more intentional with documentation when I lost my mum in 2019 and I realized that I only had two or three pictures with her.’ Her face softens as she talks about her mother, whose name is tattooed on her forearm, smiling a little sadly saying, ‘I think you heal forever when you lose a loved one.’ Her grief birthed in her a renewed dedication to capturing life both in its spectacular and mundane moments, celebrating the beauty of existence: a principle that has monumentally shaped her creative praxis.

As we settle into the conversation, Chigozie beams with excitement and a quiet, pleased self-assurance telling me it’s been quite the journey, quite the year. Born on the 13 of November 1997 at St. Nicholas Hospital in Ikeja, Lagos, she holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Lagos but is quick to state that the teachings were mostly theoretical and that it is in the real process of self-exploration and experimentation that an artist is born. ‘Personally, I don’t believe anybody is self-taught. As long as you learnt from something or someone, whether an institution or a person, you were taught.’ In her third year of industrial training (part of the degree where students must undertake real work in their respective industries), she worked at Universal Studio, Iganmu from 2015 to 2016. This was the place where her mind for art awakened and even outside the required timetable and schedule of her tutors, she continued to mix colours and experiment with techniques on her own time.

She tells me that right after finishing university at the age of 20, most of her work was just ‘practice and practice’ without any focus on exhibition. Just hours and hours and hours of painting. She tells me: ‘In the beginning, perfection was an important aspiration in my practice.’ This was combined with the tendency to mindlessly imitate her tutor but halfway through, she stopped going to his studio and began to forge her own style and her own voice. Observing this, a mentor gently guided her into using her work as a means of expressing the things that were important to her. With a look both earnest and certain, she says: ‘Art is a great way to talk to a large number of people at once.’