Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? (2013)
Single-channel digital video
11 mins 55 secs
Edition 5 of 5 + 2AP
Screening 8-30 September 2024
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Relation de Voyage
Wura-Natasha Ogunji: Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?This video documents the public performance piece Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? which happened in Lagos, Nigeria on April 18, 2013. A group of women walked through the streets of Sabo, Yaba hauling water kegs behind them as a way to pose questions about the work of women, labor and the politics of change. The costumes refer to traditional masquerades but with an Afrofuturisic touch. Ogunji references the Egungun masquerade which women are not allowed to perform. Masquerades are quite powerful for both community and performer. The masked dancer is allowed to go anywhere; they are protected. People are not allowed to even touch them. There are men who holds sticks (and use them) if you attempt to get too close. Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? draws from this tradition by allowing women to occupy a sacred and dynamic space within the public environment. But in this case, there is a constant recontextualization of the sacred and the profane as the artists perform the arduous (if not impossible) task of hauling water kegs through the city.Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? forms part of a series of performance works created by Ogunji entitled Mogbo mo branch [I heard and I branched myself into the party] which explore the presence of women in public space in Lagos, Nigeria.Performers: Taiwo Aiyedogbon, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Adeola Olagunju, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Odun Orimolade, Mary Oruoghor, Wana Udobang with (cane men) Wale Adewole, Abiodun Akinrinola, Oluwasegun Famade, Tumi Gbebire, Mike Obi, Samuel Ololade, Saydo Omotosho, Toyosi Soile, Steven UgohVideographer: Emamode EdosioCostumes: Modesta Oge Okafor and Wura-Natasha OgunjiCourtesy of the artist, SLQS Gallery and Fridman Gallery -
Disbelonging and unruly return in the performance art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji by Bimbola Akinbola
In response to Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? by Wura-Natasha Ogunji[...] In her 2013 performance of Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?, Ogunji, along with six other Nigerian artists (Taiwo Aiyedogbon, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Deola Gold, Odun Orimolade, Mary Oruoghor, and Wana Udobang), took to the busy streets of Yaba near the University of Lagos; they walked two miles from the Centre for Contemporary Art to Ogunji’s apartment. Nigerian art historian Peju Layiwola points out that the matching material used for the costumes was reminiscent of “aso ebi,” a uniform dress popular amongst the Yoruba and often worn at events like weddings in order to show cooperation and solidarity among certain guests (Layiwola 148). Upon seeing that the women were dragging heavy jugs, many watching the performance responded with fear and confusion, even speculating that the women were being punished. Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? was also a powerful act of worldmaking. Jose Muñoz writes that worldmaking practices:
transport the performer and the spectator to a vantage point where transformation and politics are imaginable. Worldmaking performances produce these vantage points by slicing into the façade of the real that is the majoritarian public sphere. Disidentificatory performances opt to do more than simply tear down the majoritarian public sphere. They dissemble that sphere of publicity and use its parts to build an alternative reality. Disidentification uses the majoritarian culture as raw material to make a new world. (Muñoz 196).
In Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? Ogunji and her collaborators took and remixed the common act of carrying water, performed by women every day, in order to build an alternate reality that felt both familiar and also deeply perplexing to those who watched; the performance utilized and reframed familiar Nigerian symbolic rituals like the egungun masquerade and aso ebi uniform, and used everyday objects as raw material to further emphasize the performers’ point, successfully attracting attention.
[...] In Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? Ogunji performs unruly return and disbelonging by pulling from a number of Yoruba customs and traditions and boldly remixing them. By doing so, she simultaneously cites tradition and breaks social norms in order to say something new and call attention to the hardships women face.
[...] The performance is not only a meditation on the act of fetching water, but also a consideration of the types of labor women are asked to perform and the invisibility of that work. The piece poses the questions, “How much is enough? What is the tipping point in a society where people struggle to meet basic needs? When do people have an opportunity to rest, reflect, envision, imagine, and enact another way of being?”
Extracts from Bimbola Akinbola (2020) Disbelonging and unruly return in the performance art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Text and Performance Quarterly, 40:2, 152-169, DOI:10.1080/10462937.2020.1721554. Read full article here.
Bimbola Akinbola is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist based in Chicago.
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Self portrait by the Artist
