Academic Tour | Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye

Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye is Lecturer in Black Geographies at the University of Edinburgh. She uses interdisciplinary and arts-based methods, including site-specific spatial interventions, to explore how Black communities produce place, spatial knowledges, and embodied ecological relations. This tour opens with Victoria's discussion of Black (geographic) ways of knowing, centering methodologies for knowing space and place that honour Black life. She will lead attendees in thinking and feeling with two artworks, using the framework of Black ecological life that centers human and nonhuman relations, including with ancestors, in the making of place: Kang Seung Lee's Erasure held like a fierce lantern and MADEYOULOOK's Mafolofolo. Beginning with Erasure held like a fierce lantern and its central installation, which resonates with Victoria as a queer ancestral altar, she asks: how might we mourn our dead, while also acknowledging their reshaped relations with us as ancestors? Then attendees will sit with MADEYOULOOK's artwork Mafolofolo, and Victoria will consider how sound, oral practices, and listening attune us to the land, landscape, and ecological (including spiritual) relations.