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The Necessity of Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis

ArchitectureFebruary/March 2025InterviewsNigeriavol9-no1
Demas Nwoko

Illustration by Ekundayo R. Baiyegunhi / THE REPUBLIC.

THE REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS

The Necessity of Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis

At 89, Demas Nwoko invites us to prioritize local community impact over international glamour and to rethink the trajectory of African art and architecture.
Demas Nwoko

Illustration by Ekundayo R. Baiyegunhi / THE REPUBLIC.

THE REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS

The Necessity of Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis

At 89, Demas Nwoko invites us to prioritize local community impact over international glamour and to rethink the trajectory of African art and architecture.

Nigeria doesn’t happen to me; I happen to Nigeria,’ Demas Nwoko, the celebrated painter, sculptor, architect and dramatist, said, while reflecting on his attempt at running for Nigeria’s president in the 1990s (fun fact: for some time, he and M.K.O. Abiola were rivals in the same party). Nwoko and I were on a turbulent Zoom call in November 2024, only a few months after I had visited one of his building projects, the New Culture Studio, in Ibadan. Many times, our call threatened to fail and, during one such moment, Nwoko, who will be 90 this year in December, did not hesitate to criticize me for not visiting him in Delta State and conducting the interview in person. Still, he remained exceptionally patient: ‘I always like talking to people,’ he later confessed. ‘I can do this for a whole day. If you are here with me for one year, I’ll be talking to you for all that one year.’

At 89, Nwoko stands tall in the discourse on African architecture and design, which in recent years has experienced a surge in global attention. Consider the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the international exhibition highly revered among architects worldwide, and where Nwoko and Nigerian-American architect and visual artist, Olalekan Jeyifous, won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the Silver Lion for a ‘promising young participant’ respectively. Lesley Lokko, the biennale’s Scottish-Ghanaian curator, was also its first Black curator. Active and prominent across several artistic fields, Nwoko resists easy categorization, insisting instead on the blending (and sometimes even transcendence) of these fields. ‘I think I was brought up to just live to create,’ he said. Nwoko is one of the last living members of the Zaria Art Society, the post-colonial movement also known as the ‘Zaria Rebels’, that sought to break away from colonial artistic traditions and assert a uniquely African aesthetic—led by illustrator, Uche Okeke, they would later translate this philosophy into what they called ‘Natural Synthesis’. ‘European contemporary artists had already recognized the aesthetics of African traditional art to the extent that they decided to allow it influence them, to move them away from naturalistic to other forms of plastic, aesthetic influences,’ Nwoko recalled of his time as a student. ‘We were able to say: okay, why won’t you teach us also about our traditional art?’

During our interview, I had the opportunity to engage with Nwoko’s thoughts on art, architecture and design, and to look back on his career, philosophy and impact on the spirited discourse African architecture and design continue to inspire.

Nwoko’s journey began in Idumuje-Ugboko, the kingdom in Delta State, where he was born into a royal family. His father’s architectural vision for the palace, he recalls, was an early influence, along with ‘a lot of the culture and way of life of my hometown or my home kingdom.’ After studying Fine Arts at the College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria and later Theatre Design in France, he returned to Nigeria, determined to bring a new visual dimension to the already vibrant storytelling of Nigerian theatre. After all, he said, ‘an artist has to have a community he belongs to and works for.’ Today, Nwoko’s works, his buildings, in particular, are known for how they integrate communal and cultural functions. ‘I do all my work for a definite community,’ he told me. ‘I work only to their aesthetic culture.’ And because he works for a specific culture, naturally such buildings also emphasize sustainability and the use of local materials.

At the heart of our interview, Nwoko argued that he failed to find similar mindfulness and community-centeredness in contemporary Nigerian artists and architects. Despite having mentored a few of them, he argued that such artists and architects have abandoned their local communities in pursuit of global recognition. ‘They are all traders,’ he said, ‘they are international, and there is nothing like that. Over there, those people are national. So, the works that they are aping are the tradition of some other person … Nigeria is not growing anywhere, technologically or anything else, because the present generation has abandoned Nigeria.’

I was curious about this perspective, considering that Nwoko has received several international awards. In 2023, he received, perhaps, the most prominent of such awards: the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architecture Biennale. ‘I don’t care what the outside world thinks about me,’ he said, when I asked him about his international recognition. ‘I care how the people here feel about what I have done … Any recognition I have got out there now is because of what I did here.’

Reading over my notes, this interview struck me as not merely a conversation but an invitation to rethink the trajectory of African art and architecture. Nwoko’s words serve as both a historical reflection and a manifesto for the future. ‘Sustainability can only be produced by you,’ is one among several critical observations he made during our conversation. Likewise, his perspective on his legacy was particularly perceptive: ‘If my influence did not amount to a visible change now, I hope that it will in future … Because, you see, aesthetic creations are truth—absolute truths. The value will never change. So, if the people of today don’t understand you, people of tomorrow might.’

Our interview continues below and has been edited for brevity and clarity.

WALE LAWAL

Thank you so much once again for agreeing to speak with us. I wanted to start with a question that can frame what we hope this interview will revolve around, and that is your identity as an artist: do you find yourself, over the years, identifying as an African artist or just as an artist? Do you feel like there is a difference between the two labels? 

DEMAS NWOKO

I am simply an artist. Like every other artist anywhere in the world, their origin and identity can be attached to them. I can be called an African artist, because I am an African and especially living and working in Africa. Everybody, everywhere in the world will call me an African artist, and that is what I am, because all artists come from somewhere, and hopefully they belong to where they come from. Hopefully, because I think nowadays, the younger generation believes that there is something called an ‘international artist’, meaning artists who come from the whole world, and they work from that perspective. I don’t know how realistic that is. I think it is unnatural. So really, an artist is an artist.

WALE LAWAL

 My next question was going to be whether we could go a bit farther back and talk about your background, your growing up, your early artistic influences while you were growing up in Idumuje-Ugboko. I wondered how your upbringing shaped your approach to art and architecture.

DEMAS NWOKO

I was born in Idumuje-Ugboko and I lived there for the first five years of my life. Then, as it was the practice in those old days, I was fostered by my maternal uncle, who was a postal telegraph officer. Normally, they were posted everywhere and anywhere in Nigeria. So, I followed him to Calabar when I was five years old and I kept living with him. We lived in different places after Calabar—Aba, then Uzuakoli in Abia State, and from there to Enugu in Enugu State, and from Enugu to Ubiaja in Edo State. And that was until 1948. I then returned to Idumuje-Ugboko to continue my education. I ended up in elementary school, a new model, which is about ten kilometres from Idumuje-Ugboko, where I did my standard five and six. From 1949, I started living in Idumuje-Ugboko. So, most of my upbringing, I could say, was in and around Idumuje-Ugboko. I was influenced by a lot of the culture and way of life of my hometown. My father was the king of Idumuje-Ugboko, so that is it about my childhood.

I attended secondary school in Merchants of Light, Oba. That is just after Onitsha. The same secondary school that Emeka Anyaoku attended. He was just a year or two ahead, of course. After secondary school, I went on to Ibadan because Ibadan was the regional headquarters of Delta State. From Ibadan, I went to Zaria. While I was in Zaria, I spent my holidays mostly in Ibadan and Idumuje-Ugboko. After I graduated from Nigeria College of Art and Technology, Zaria, which is now Ahmadu Bello University, I did a one-year study in France. I studied Fine Arts in Zaria, and in France, I studied Theatre Design. After that one year, in 1961 or 1962, I came back to Ibadan and took up a post at the University of Ibadan as the first Nigerian staff in the School of Drama. You can see that I travelled around the East and in between during my life in Idumuje-Ugboko. When I started working in Ibadan, I went in and out of the state and continued life there for 50 years, though I decided to withdraw my service from the University of Ibadan and return to Idumuje-Ugboko in 1978. Since then, I have been living and working from Idumuje-Ugboko. I have not relocated.

WALE LAWAL

Did Nigeria’s independence era inform your artistic development in any way? As Nigeria became independent, did that change your approach to art and architecture in any way or form?

DEMAS NWOKO

No, absolutely not. That would have been unnatural. If you are going to become a professional artist, it has to start early, from within, from your childhood background. I studied Fine Arts throughout my secondary school. That was from 1951 to 1955. So, you see how far it is from independence. But the good thing in my life then were my influences—the architecture of the palace, which was designed by my father himself, supervised by him. It looked as if I got that architectural gene from my father. My activities were meant to influence life happening in Nigeria, not the other way around. I was the one supposed to be influencing what was happening in Nigeria, not Nigeria influencing what I was producing. It is still the same up till today.

WALE LAWAL

You were a founding member of the Zaria Art Society, a movement that broke away from colonial artistic traditions. Can you tell us a bit more about what motivated that breakaway, and maybe the process of developing that philosophy of Natural Synthesis?

DEMAS NWOKO

Before I went to Zaria, independence was already in the air. The move towards independence had already started from the late 1950s. Even during our secondary education, we were all being brought up to prepare for an independent Nigeria. In that way, what happened in Zaria was also happening in the University of Ibadan—in the Faculty of Arts. That was what drew people like Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. They were doing the same thing, I suppose, that we were doing in Zaria. All the teachers were from Europe, and they were training us to run a modern, independent nation. The curriculum of the universities, which were the University of Ibadan and the Nigeria College of Art and Technology, was to pass on to us the aesthetics of the British or European culture. Because, after all, they had to teach us what they knew. Anyway, after we got what they were teaching us, we saw that learning about our own culture, our own self was absent. So, we on our own decided to introduce this as an extracurricular activity. The same thing happened with the theatre and literature movements.

While our teachers were teaching us the standard academic stuff—teaching us how they were being taught in Europe—we also read that African art influenced European modern artists to start innovating; that is, to be able to move away from the religious tradition. European contemporary artists had already recognized the aesthetics of African traditional art to the extent that they decided to allow it influence them, to move them away from naturalistic to other forms of plastic, aesthetic influences. We were able to say: okay, why won’t you teach us also about our traditional art? Of course, that was challenging because they were European teachers. They couldn’t do that because they didn’t know about it. So, we started to teach ourselves. And that was how that movement came about.

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WALE LAWAL

Your work spans painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and design. How have these different art forms influenced one another?

demas nwoko

Knowing my background, which was a background of the feeling or the recognition of basic static parameters, I developed creative art as the creation of aesthetics—positive aesthetics. This played out in all spheres of art, including music. Sound also becomes sound from idiom. This aesthetic idiom, their end product, is the same in human beings. Using any material that you choose, you are still striving to create that favourable aesthetic experience for man. So, working with all the media, the difference is just what material you are manipulating—but the end product is to create aesthetic recreation for man. I think my childhood upbringing and my steady sensitivity made this possible for me to acquire. I am a favourable agent because my worldview, or view of existence, was not clogged up by the pursuit of the average man—that is materialism. I think I was brought up to just live to create.

WALE LAWAL

Your buildings are known for how they integrate communal and cultural functions. One building, for example, is the New Culture Studio in Ibadan. I wondered what have been some of the major learnings you’ve had from your approach to space in architecture, especially in creating environments that foster community and cultural expression?

demas nwoko

I believe that an artist has to have a community he belongs to and works for. In fact, when some young artists come to me, I ask them, what community are you working for? So, you work for a definite community, and in that way, you will be focused on their own aesthetic choices. People who come from other cultures, like Europe, also appreciate my work. They find something in it. There is that common human aesthetic. Every man has a different one. Then some are localized to their culture, which is the geography and all that. So, yes, I do all my work for a definite community; I work only to their aesthetic culture.

WALE LAWAL

That is really powerful. Another question I have for you, following from that, is that your architectural projects often emphasize sustainability and the use of local materials. Obviously, Nigeria has changed so much in the decades you have been active as a cultural practitioner. I wondered, from your own experience, how has the relationship between architecture, culture and the environment changed in Nigeria, and maybe even Africa more broadly? Is it getting better or are we getting worse?

DEMAS NWOKO

Well, I think that the mainstream took off on the wrong tangent. That is, they did not work on the tangent that I was following, which I think is the only viable tangent. For sustainability, you have to create from a deficit place using all the resources that you have, exploiting all the tools you have around you first before you can go further to search and add. But if you are going out to bring in more all the time, I think you are on the wrong trajectory. Because we are not working for a definite culture, we are in the wilderness today. That is why my work is coming up to light universally now. Because I was doing what everybody should have been doing. So, anybody who is not doing as I was doing will be in the wilderness today. Sustainability can only be produced by you. Our people have a saying in our language that your property, your own thing that you earned, that you own, is the one that gives you a stable existence.

WALE LAWAL

In 2023, you won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architectural Biennale. A lot of the discourse at the time emphasized how this was a monumental award. Because for a lot of people, especially in the architectural world, your architectural projects are these really incredible works that have been done without formal architectural training. And I have always wondered what your thoughts are about that perspective and this idea of formal architectural training; because to me, it often seems like another way of saying Western architectural training. Do you think more African artists or architects should be looking to disrupt this idea of formal training or Western training, as you have done?

DEMAS NWOKO

Unfortunately, we have overrated formal educational training as an instrument that will make you productive or creative. Formal training is just a set of information that is supposed to make you, from practise, an experienced craftsman. You know that in the traditional setting we had all the training. Because it wasn’t written down, we had 100 per cent training. We could do anything. In fact, the tradition will do more, because the other plane of existence also put in it as a commonplace thing.

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Illustration by Shalom Ojo / THE REPUBLIC.

WALE LAWAL

Let’s talk a bit more about New Culture Studio. I wanted to understand what inspired your design choices for the project. It is an iconic project, and I wanted to understand more of your process for designing it. What inspired the design for it?

DEMAS NWOKO

It was not all conceived at the same time. It started and continued to evolve as we went on. For example, the front side of the studio was just my residential house, with my own private studio for painting upstairs and sculpturing downstairs. In fact, that was the first building there, because I had to have a practicing studio. When I earned more money, I built the front side of the studio for my residence. It changed as my experience in the university grew, especially from our department. I saw that our graduates didn’t have enough practicals in the university, so I decided to turn my residence into a postgraduate training school for our graduates. I recruited some and told them to come over to the studio. By that time, I had started extending the back of the studio, but eventually I turned my residence into a training art studio.

It would have ended up with the front of the house being for painting upstairs and sculpturing downstairs but remember that I was now employed as a dramatist. So, the theatre aspect crept in and that was when the theatre developed. I studied Theatre Design and Decoration in France, and that was what qualified me to be a leader in the School of Drama at the University of Ibadan; even being the first Nigerian teacher there then. So, my site is a design and visual theatre building. I got a commission, and I wanted an opportunity to design and build a model African theatre. I hoped I could do it in the building of our department or the School of Drama, but I wasn’t allowed to do that. So, when they were starting the University of Benin, I went there. The military governor granted me a commission to design and build the theatre. From my research, I felt that the best African theatre should be modelled after the Greek ancient amphitheatre, an open-air theatre. I went to Greece before I started designing for the Benin theatre, which is now a cultural centre. I went to the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, which is over a thousand years old. I did all the physical measurements and the performance parameters. I came back to Ibadan and then acquired the land behind my own building, and excavated it to build a one-to-one scale model of the Greek theatre. I wanted to do that before I applied it to building the theatre. So, that was how I excavated a model of the ancient Greek theatre behind my building.

Bit by bit, I started using the place for my teaching in the University of Ibadan, especially for my dance classes. Later, I started formalizing it into a permanent building and that was how that theatre grew. I practised all areas of art, including publishing, when I let my building become a teaching studio. It was there that I published the New Cultural Review. Now, with all the branches of the building being used, I have acquired more land behind it, and I have designed a complex of many studios as individual floors. It is going to grow larger. You can see the front now has another side that we hope to build and develop. The building grew out of need and necessity. I didn’t design or intend it to be that before.

WALE LAWAL

This reminds me that over the years, you have also worked closely with many other African artists and thinkers. Collaboration is something that seems very important or comes out very importantly in your work. I understand, for example, that you worked with Professor Wole Soyinka on several theatrical productions. And I wondered, from your own perspective, how have these collaborations enriched your work over the years? What have you found to be the value of collaborating with other experts?

DEMAS NWOKO

That is not the case. My first collaboration with Wole Soyinka was during the preparation of our independence celebration, and he was commissioned to do a play. He wrote A Dance of the Forests. While he was producing that, I was still in Zaria as a final year student. But I was residing in Ibadan. I knew everything that was happening, even in the University of Ibadan. In fact, I did my first mural there. He asked me to do some stage design for A Dance of the Forests. That was my first meeting with him, an encounter on theatre. I did what I could. I hadn’t gotten training in theatre before. I did some backdrops, and Soyinka had to amend it himself. That was an eye opener for me and it ignited my interest to go and study Theatre Design. When the opportunity came to go to Europe, I chose France and Theatre Design, so that when I came back I’d be able to serve the theatre better and do better stage design. That was how I ended up getting my first formal employment in the School of Drama. My interest in theatre was without genesis, although I was in the drama society in Zaria.

Soyinka was more situated in the theatre field but there was no School of Drama. He wasn’t involved at that time, but they set up the Mbari Artists and Writers Club. The club was where all the artists and writers met to practise together. It was not only with J. P. Clark, Okigbo, Mabel Segun and Ulli Beier, who was the cultural activator for all that. We were all in Mbari together. My association continued under Mbari with Soyinka and others too. It would have deepened when he was appointed the head of department of the School of Drama but, unfortunately, the civil war didn’t make it happen.

Soyinka got broken a bit because of his involvement in the war, but after that, he still came back to take the post. He didn’t stay long. He relocated to the University of Ife for reasons that also happened to me; the University of Ibadan didn’t give him professorship because they didn’t think that creativity attaches you to professorship. In spite of my 50 years with the university, they didn’t give me professorship either. So, when you people call me professor, you should be very careful because you might be calling me Professor Peller the magician. It was just all my activities that made everybody call me professor. That collaboration that would have matured after I studied stage design to now be able to design Soyinka’s stage never really materialized. Hence, I never did any stage design for him because he always did his own stage himself.

WALE LAWAL

Thank you for clarifying that. The next question I wanted to ask was more about this idea that art, especially African art, needs to be political. And I wondered from your own perspective, through your art, through your designs, through your architecture, do you see these as forms of social commentary or critique? In that debate, would you say your work is political or it is not political in any way?

DEMAS NWOKO

Well, if you work for your community, there is no way you won’t be a politician, because in the traditional community, everybody wants a position. Our political culture was total. African political culture is total. Everybody was involved. So really, politics is part of life. Politics is the act of government that is culture really. In fact, what we call politics today is really where the evolution of culture is. Every artist can choose to work on subjects. Now, it is a question of different types of subjects. I did paintings about the civil war. I did paintings about human behaviour, really seeing the lighter side of things to make it more comfortable for them. That is normal. Every artist does that—works on different subjects or different aspects of cultural events. My subject varies and that is normal.

But unless you meant partisan—an artist should not be partisan. He shouldn’t be limited. If you choose to be partisan, it will limit you. Audiences will judge you by that. But the other side is African art lends itself to social commentary, because African art is very expressive. It is very eloquent. It talks to its beholder. It talks to its audience very easily. That is why I am in love with African art, and that is how I practise. Even my buildings also interact with you, talk with you. So, if you practise real African art, you are about to be very eloquent in your form, in the aesthetic essence and all that.

WALE LAWAL

I wanted to look more outwards at the ecosystem, the cultural landscape today. You have mentored many younger artists and architects. Earlier, you talked about the number of people who come to meet you, and you ask them about their community, and so I wondered, as you turn 90 in 2025, what excites you about these younger artists and architects? What excites you today about the cultural landscape across Africa that you have helped to nurture?

DEMAS NWOKO

Nothing. They are not doing well because they are abandoning their community. They are all traders; they are international, and there is nothing like that. Over there, those people are national. So, the works that they are aping is the tradition of some other person. And in the globalized world, the rule is that you should bring to the table your own unique property. If you copied another person’s creative property, they could sue you. So, nobody is supposed to bring to the international seat any other thing except their own. That is why I say that they are not doing well.

Nigeria is not growing anywhere, technologically or anything else, because the present generation has abandoned Nigeria. I don’t know where they are heading to. For me, they are heading for a decadent world that is disappearing. Or do they have to wait till that disappears? That is if they will be alive, because while that is disappearing and they are with them, they might follow them to disappear. Here, we are still virgin. We won’t disappear. We still have space to build up more and to create more. That is why all my works were done here. It didn’t stop the international world from recognizing me, because what they are offering us is their own because we have oil money. We keep going to buy their own and bring here, and it doesn’t work here. Nothing we bought is sustainable here, unless you can tear it apart, study it and then repeat it, reinvent the wheel. People accuse me that I want to reinvent the wheel. They won’t do what has been done outside. They’d rather buy it. It is very expensive. It impoverishes you. I wrote a book for my campaign for presidency called The Impoverished Generation. The book is available in the city. Do you not know that I contested for president? My last opponent in our party was M. K. O. Abiola, and my competition with him ended when our party, in all their wisdom, created the South South region and zoned Delta State out of the Western Region. So, I stopped running.

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WALE LAWAL

What did that experience of running for office teach you or tell you about Nigeria or your place in Nigeria?

DEMAS NWOKO

Nigeria doesn’t happen to me; I happen to Nigeria. I am still happening to Nigeria.

WALE LAWAL

I wanted to ask an additional question in that regard, while we are still on the topic of Nigeria, of you happening to Nigeria, your influence on Nigeria. Again, you have had a career that has spanned several decades. You have seen Nigeria, or you have been able to influence Nigeria, both when Nigeria was ‘doing well’ and when Nigeria was ‘not doing well’, and you are, as you say, still happening to Nigeria today. Your work is still influential in Nigeria today. But I think a lot of the artists and architects that are younger, that are working today, would argue that they are facing a Nigeria that is very difficult, that the economic challenges are too tough for them to cope, for them to survive in Nigeria. Maybe that is why they have to look to the international market. And I wondered, from your own experience as somebody who has been able to influence Nigeria for such a long period, what advice do you have? We have had a military era. We have had a civil war. We have had so many different challenges, but your work was still able to persevere and still able to even flourish beyond those challenges. How have you been able to create compelling work, even through some of the most difficult times in Nigeria?

DEMAS NWOKO

It is not about the hard times. There are no times that are harder than the other. Check the history of man, contemporary situations are always viewed as hard. Yes, there may be short times of crazy devastation but yes, economically, it’s a modest society. It has always been hard. Your economy is what you make. If it is sustainable, you are a bit comfortable. If it is unsustainable, you are on your own, you are very unstable. And if we are not able to change our direction and become more sustainable, as I said, you’re on your own, you perish. The place that you are supposed to be to make things happen is your own place. It is your community. Outside your community, you take what you get. This statement that ‘I happen to Nigeria, Nigeria doesn’t happen to me,’ is what is normal, because in your community or society, every individual performs, every individual fulfils their obligation to their society. In the traditional society, the day you are born, they go to the oracle. Ifa will say this and that, and the parents will begin to train that child towards that aspect of social need the child is supposed to perform. Everybody is supposed to happen to their place by performing what has been ordained for them to do. In this case, what God created you to do for your society.

WALE LAWAL

Let’s come back to the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement which you won at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. Just reflecting on that award, how is the representation and reception of African aesthetics in global arts and architecture changing? Do you find that the world has become more receptive to African aesthetics and African modernism, or should African artists even be caring about global reception?

DEMAS NWOKO

You see, I am not in that field. I am not in that trajectory. I don’t care what the outside world thinks about me. I care how the people here feel about what I have done, but if they invite me to come and design something in the long term, I will give them something. I’ll try my best to make sure that I give something and it will be African-based because I have nothing else to offer. Any recognition I have got out there now is because of what I did here. I’ll give an example. At the end of that one year I spent in France studying theatre decoration, I was commissioned to do stage design for an opera show, one of Mozart’s operas. They taught me the traditional European design for opera. But in that design, I did what I thought was an African aesthetic for visuals. While I was preparing this, the team was very suspicious. They were not sure that it will be appreciated by the audience. At a point they said, look, maybe we should do away with his design and play with an open stage, but let’s give him a chance. When the show opened, when the curtain opened, and my set was there without anybody, the audience rose and clapped for some minutes. The organizer said it has never happened, that they clapped for the set, which is not like their traditional set.

After that, the reviewers said that was the first time anybody, any designer, had interpreted Mozart’s music graphically—the best ever. They asked me, how did you understand Mozart’s music so well that you can translate it into the set, because their own sets don’t reflect the senses of the music. The artist did his own for physical things, and the music was there, but they found, for first time, that the physical set was like they were listening to Mozart’s music. So how? How come that you, a designer, could interpret Mozart’s music graphically in such a perfect manner? I told them I’d only been in France for one year and that what happened was that the music I was hearing sounded exactly like the music that my father played on the hand piano. My father used to play one. I said that it sounded like that, and I had been listening to this music all my life. So, you see that even when I was called upon there, I didn’t repeat what they told me because I didn’t see their own design as aesthetically worthy. Being an African artist, I could only express African aesthetics.

WALE LAWAL

That is really powerful. When you look back on your career, what are you most proud of, and when you think about the future, are you hopeful or are you fearful?

DEMAS NWOKO

I don’t have an eye. I don’t do anything for myself. So, there is nothing like hopeful or not hopeful. I am living my life, A to Z. It is what every person gets out of it that matters. Yes, I’m a bit comfortable. Let me put it this way—because the little I have heard people say without knowing that I was around, while looking at my work; it is very comforting, because they seem to see what I put in the work exactly the way I put it. Which means that I’m a bit comfortable that I’m getting through to everybody. In that way, I have delivered what I am supposed to do and that is all. If my influence did not amount to a visible change now, I hope that it will in future. Because that is natural, because life is short. Usually, what you do might not become fully understood even while you are around. That has happened through all ages; that after the person is gone, people begin to appreciate their work better. Because, you see, aesthetic creations are truth—absolute truths. The value will never change. So, if the people of today don’t understand you, people of tomorrow might. Timescale does not matter in the world. One day, another day, one day at a time. I wrote a poem once and I posted it on the top of my studio—‘I knew what I was yesterday. I know what I’m doing today for tomorrow.’⎈

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