Ilẹ̀ Lab is an indigenous lab based in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria focused on collective trauma healing, creativity and education through indigenous design and material culture.
We believe African indigenous sovereignty and global indigenous coalition building are paramount to global change and liberation.
Ilẹ̀ means “land” and so much more.
In indigenous Yoruba practice Ilẹ̀ is a physical and material medium for unbreakable promises and covenants. Ilẹ̀ and the use of Ilẹ̀ to make promises (Ilẹ̀pa) is an indigenous ‘social contract’ that predates that of western liberal society's by centuries. Ilẹ̀ is a deity within Yoruba cosmology, and a powerful one, as it is within Ilẹ̀ that all the òrìṣà, who once walked the earth, are buried. Ilẹ̀ is sanctuary in ground. Ilẹ̀ is heaven IN earth, rather than the sky.
*I share this indigenous knowledge +cite my elders +teachers Professor +Chief Àwísẹ Awo Àgbàyé Baba Wándé Abímbọ́lá +Yèyé Àṣà Sola Muibat Yussuf. I ask that when you share this knowledge +work you also cite me +my teachers.
Statement from the Director:
Ilẹ̀ is a collective research space, studio, and platform born out of grief+frustration +the courageous willingness to re-learn the aforementioned as beautiful +generative emotions.This work has been stewarded through ancestral guidance, remembrance +deep work undoing internalised antiblackness, anti-africanness,+colonialism. The lab is a culmination of my many years as an academic scholar, doctoral student, critical maker, decolonial designer, neuroplasticity learner, somatic self-healer, +reclaimer of ancestral gifts. I grew weary of the shallow representations of decolonial possibility made by designers, galleries, and arts foundations in Lagos, Nigeria where I live and work and have centered my research for almost a decade. The current design and art spaces within Lagos do not at all uphold the true ethos of indigeneity or collective healing +once the woke washing era is over they will move on. But I will not.