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A Memory Foretold

Part 2 Project 2023
Luke Temiloluwa Stevens
University of Greenwich | UK
The project is a self-exploration of identity. As a British architect with Nigerian parentage, I explore the contradictory symptoms of modern and precolonial childhoods. British colonisation warped Nigerian childhoods, undermining precolonial methods, shaping a generation around a plastic, consumerist culture. The ‘dangling-of-the-carrot’ of a Westernised childhood drove Nigerians to pursue such a life for their children, thus, an inconsistent coexistence between modern and precolonial upbringings emerged.

A Memory Foretold is the story of reclamation of Western fantastical imagery. It follows a decolonised dreamscape in which architecture acts as a political character, repurposing the Disney aesthetics that were fundamental to the Westernisation of Nigerian childhoods. Replacing the roofs of Cinderella’s castle to adorn them with Yoruba crowns, for example, illustrates the dichotomy in the British-Nigerian upbringing, using storytelling to critique architectural norms and explore issues of identity.

Testing the malleability of architecture and its inherent storytelling capability, the project manipulates European architecture as an allegorical ‘desanctifying’ of colonial heritage. Con¬sequently, a denunciation of the elitism that such architecture represents is gestured. The childhood a Nigerian mother was refused, but that her British son received, is reclaimed through speculative places that experiment with an unsettling ‘Africanisation’ of European architec¬ture.


Tutor(s)
Ifigeneia Liangi
Daniel Wilkinson
2023
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