Poetry performance
and moving image
across speculative
environmentsPoetry, indigenous
technologies
and quantum media
through ritual
frameworks Poetry, African
epistemologies and
decolonial memory
within archival
systemsPoetry, cultural
museology and
restitution discourse
across curatorial
fields
I work at the intersection of body, camera, and projection,
treating performance as a living editing process. My pieces
unfold like films that can breathe, where time bends
through gesture, repetition, and duration.My practice approaches technology as something ceremonial
rather than purely functional. I build interfaces that
behave like rituals, allowing code, sound, and movement to
operate as cosmological tools.I am interested in how memory survives outside official
records and how the archive can be rewritten from an
ancestral position. My work listens for what was erased and
stages forms of return through voice, image, and embodiment.I engage the museum as a contested space shaped by absence,
extraction, and the politics of display. My projects
imagine curatorial methods that prioritise repair,
circulation, and the right of objects and stories to go
back home.
David Osaodion Odiase
Transdisciplinary poet and member of the African Narrative Collective whose practice traverses the interstices of poetry, performance, film, installation, indigenous technologies, and speculative methodologies. His work critically engages with Africa’s entangled histories, epistemologies, and cultural imaginaries, often seeking to dismantle hegemonic narratives and foreground ancestral knowledge systems as vital instruments for reworlding.
Odiase’s moving-images, performance works and art installations have been presented at institutions and festivals across Africa, Europe and the Americas, including the Akdemie Der Kunst Berlin, African International Film Festival (Nigeria), Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Germany), SOMA (Mexico), the National Poetry Library (UK), Kampnagel Hamburg, POETAS DI(N)VERSOS (Spain), E-WERK Luckenwalde’s Human Machine Fellowship in the context of the Ancestral Memory Lab exhibition, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House for World Cultures) as part of the Berlin Science Week.
He was also an artist-in-residence at Studio Quantum, an international events and artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art, organised by the Goethe Institut Ireland.
Recent Projects & Events
Ongoing screenings, exhibitions, and performances across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Institutional presentations engaging Africa’s entangled histories and epistemologies.
My Grandmother the Astronaut Sings to me from beyond the Stars.
Years Ago, my grandmother, the astronaut, passed away at a ripe old age, singing. Around that time, Gaia’s space observatory satellite, carrying twin-telescopes at the earth’s orbit, began mapping our Milky Way, recording celestial bodies, star positions, motion, brightness and spectra. This ancestral radio project stages a translocation: by converting the geographical coordinates of her final resting place into its astronomical equivalence — a cosmic twin, and using the data from this region of our galaxy to create a soundscape, I also center through my own mother’s voice, her mother’s favourite songs, prayers, oral essence and libations for the afterlife. Utilizing parameter-mapped sonification, the sonic pieces were made scaling through 10,265 stellar objects.
The ancestral radio debuts as a prototype, serving as an audio station and Wi-Fi radio frequency transmitter, and takes the exterior of a calabash, a plant fruit often used for ritualistic, ceremonies, cultural and musical purposes. It is a conduit, a listening altar, a portal, an invitation to remember the ones dearest to us who have become ancestral-astronauts, to reimagine the dialect of our universe as something ethereal, both without and within us. Here I hope to recast love (as the one my grandmother has for me) as the technology through which we touch and reach for that which is beyond the finger tips of empirical science.
This project does not stand alone. It was conceived as part of the Ancestral Lab Exhibition, which I and Cate Lartey was invited to, by fellow artists Safiya Yon and hn. lyonga, within the context of the Human Machine Fellowship, an initiative of the Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin and Ewerk Lukenwalde.
IN MY MOTHER TONGUE THERE ARE NO HORCRUXES
Is an immersive performance poetry installation that draws on quantum principles and African Indigenous rites, histories, and spiritual frameworks. Engaging animism, ancestorship, multiple realms, and non-linear time, the work unfolds as a quantum ceremony for the soul.
African traditional belief systems, deeply rooted in animism, understand all existence as ensouled. Within this work, the soul is allegorized through artefacts, both tangible and intangible cultural heritage, as well as human remains held within Western colonial museums.
The project engages time as a primary element of redemptive and decolonial ritual, seeking to reclaim what was taken or fractured through centuries of Euro-American punitive expeditions in Africa. These histories have fissured the continuum between the living, the unborn, and the ancestors.
In another register, the work proposes a reassessment of futurisms in which science enters into dialogue with Indigenous African epistemologies. It imagines a world where science and its institutions are not instruments of racialized power, but are instead oriented toward repair, justice, healing, and symbiosis.
The work was produced in collaboration with Studio Quantum Ireland, Goethe-Institut Irland, Goethe-Institut Mexiko, SOMA México, and LagosMx.
CONNECT
For inquiries, collaborations, and institutional engagements.
David Odiase’s work spans poetry, performance, moving-image, and installation, presented across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. For programming, exhibitions, screenings, or research collaborations, please get in touch.
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