Digital Art Commission: Dele Adeyemo’s Trans-epistemic Mapping

The art celebration will take place in the Nick Mirkopoulos Screening Room, York University Keele Campus, as part of Nuit Blanche— Toronto’s city-wide, all-night celebration of contemporary art— Adeyemo will be in conversation with Toronto-based journalist and urban planning scholar Nehal El-Hadi about his practice and their shared interests in the body (racialized, gendered), performance, Black geographies, and circulations of sand.

Dele Adeyemo (b. 1986) is a UK/Nigeria-based architect, urban theorist, creative director, and PhD Candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His projects take form through alternative mapping strategies, installations, and interdisciplinary events. His work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2022), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2021), the Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), and the Venice Architecture Biennial (2012).

Through Adeyemo’s art practice and collaboratively-taught Architecture Design Studio course, he has developed a research process that he terms “trans-epistemic mapping.” For Adeyemo, this process is inspired by multiple cartographic methods and builds upon the typical considerations of an architectural site analysis—such as historical factors, topography, zoning, climate, and cultural patterns that are used to understand the context of a location—to work toward alternative modes of mapping that may include embodied experiences of Black life, non-linear conceptions of time, as well as Indigenous subjectivities. Adeyemo deeply engages with a location and its contributing communities to understand and convey the entangled nature of differing world views and the spaces and architectures they’ve produced.