Reflections on Process
Notes on Reflexivity and Positionality…
The act of selecting images, grouping them into themed narratives, and manipulating them to create a story is a form of curatorial work that is both intuitive and inherently subjective. During the design process, I started to reflect on the act of joining similar but dispersed images into a single frame and the implications of putting them in conversation – I don’t have answers to some of these questions, but perhaps the motive itself holds some meaning.
On the selection process: I am Nigerian, and of Yorùbá descent, which has naturally led me to gravitate towards selecting familiar objects. However, I must admit that I don’t know all about the historical and contextual uses of the objects featured. My intention was not to provide an alternative or superior narrative, but rather to explore the fluid and compositional nature of knowledge through the creative process.
Digital curation and the affordances of media: Curating a digital project offers certain benefits such as accessibility to data. However, my focus on using license-free data, limited my options of the images to work with, which in turn impacted the direction of the collages. I had to refine my Google search times and repurpose the available images.
Using Adobe Photoshop, I was able to experiment with various features like layering, cropping, scaling, removing backgrounds, distorting, and changing colors or opacities. These creative choices and affordances were central in crafting the stories and narratives I tried to convey. I enjoyed including the short descriptive texts as captions to the collages and like the images, the texts do not say so much or aim to answer any of the questions posed – they simultaneously reveal and conceal gaps in what we know.
