Azu Nwagbogu

Azu Nwagbogu

Founder/Director, African Artist’s Foundation & Lagos Photo Festival, Lagos, Nigeria

Regenerative Cultural Practice: The African Artists' Foundation's Home Museum and Dig Where You Stand Projects

This presentation examines two interconnected initiatives by the African Artists' Foundation (AAF) that reimagine the relationship between communities, cultural heritage, and institutional power. The "Home Museum" and "Dig Where You Stand" (DWYS) projects demonstrate how art and cultural practice can serve as regenerative tools for decolonization and the transformation of museological frameworks.

"Dig Where You Stand," inspired by Sven Lindqvist's concept of localized historical inquiry, is a series of traveling exhibitions moving through coastal African cities. The project explores themes of restitution, repatriation, migration, and displacement, challenging Western frameworks for engaging with art. Through workshops, roundtables, and collaborative exhibitions, DWYS develops community toolkits designed to jumpstart regenerative economic processes, empowering marginalized communities to reclaim their histories.

The "Home Museum" concept developed in collaboration with Dr. Clementine Deliss for LagosPhoto Festival 2020, with the title, Rapid Response Restitution, creates digital archives of ordinary household objects and their personal narratives. By documenting items like heirlooms and photographs – objects often dismissed by museums – the initiative reveals the priceless memories embedded within everyday material culture. This democratizes museological practice, challenging institutional hierarchies that privilege what colonizers deemed worthy over sentimental value. It also seeks to spark a thematic intelligence around the value of heritage whilst utilizing the urgency and immediacy of photography.

Operating at different scales – continental networks and intimate domestic spaces – both projects shift power from extractive institutions to communities themselves. They provide practical frameworks for cultural institutions seeking inclusive, community-centered approaches to collection and exhibition, demonstrating pathways toward regenerative cultural and economic practices rooted in African perspectives.

Biography:

Azu Nwagbogu is an internationally acclaimed curator, interested in evolving new models of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. In his practice, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for reflection, civic engagement, ecology and repatriation – both tangible and symbolic.

Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non- profit organization based in Lagos, Nigeria. He also serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, an annual international arts festival of photography held in Lagos. He is the publisher of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. He was awarded “Curator of Year 2021” by the Royal Photographic Society, UK, and is also listed amongst the hundred most influential people in the art world by ArtReview.

In 2021, Nwagbogu launched the project Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) – From Coast to Coast, which offers a new model for institutional building and engagement. The exhibition took place in Ibrahim’s Mahama’s culture hub SCCA in Tamale, Ghana. In 2023, he was appointed “Explorer at Large” by National Geographic Society to serve as an ambassador for the organization and receive support to continue his storytelling work across Africa and globally, a title shared by select few global change makers. In 2024, he curated the first ever Benin Pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale.