Nwando will be in residency at BAC as part of her Foyle Foundation Commission.

She is developing ‘The Swan’: a performance lecture interrogating the erasure of black histories and ritual cultures.

Nwando wants to develop sensory environments for neurodivergent audiences, and use access creatively throughout the process to question “how do we continue to make work that is evolving accessibility wise?”

Nwando Ebizie's Distorted Constellations, presented as part of Liberty Festival, created an immersive installation using ambisonic sound and projections onto gauze to transport the audience into the imagined landscape of the artist’s perceptual reality. Here, visitors traveled through a fragmented labyrinth inspired by Ebizie’s rare neurological disorder, Visual Snow, a condition where the artist’s vision is continually full of swirling coloured, translucent dots (like a George Seurat painting), with glowing lines, auras, light bursts and halos.

Through Distorted Constellations Ebizie proposed an acceptance of a neuro-diverse spectrum as a radical way to make changes in society, establishing one in which all diversity is allowed space to flourish. She presented us with a visceral new world that draws upon the language of sci-fi and ritualistic practice to further warp and bend reality towards a landscape for new, transformative encounters. From this exploration of atypical perception, she encourages us to question how much we can trust our senses and therefore our understanding of our own environments. She asks us to recognise that our own unique neurology has an implicit effect on how we perceive the world - forming bias and prejudices - and map our place within it.

Distorted Constellations subverted the space it was located in order to go beyond its physical limitations. The electronic score, projections and recursive surfaces helped create this visceral new world by distorting senses of sight, sound, the vestibular sense (perception of body position in space). This process revealed to the audience how distinct each navigation of space is - further emphasising the artist’s call for a celebration and acceptance of individual diversities.

Through Ebizie’s personal quest, we were guided to tap into ritualistic practices of transformative healing that disorient space and present it as an illusion - left with the reminder that; (according to neuroscientists), reality is subjective, perception is fallible and how we experience the world is due to our own specific neurology.

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Taking Afro Diaspora Ritual Movement and rhythm as an Afrofuturist technology, Nwando Ebizie as Lady Vendredi led this workshop, connecting participants with an ancestral movement, geared towards the future self. Building up movement, rhythm and song worked towards group improvisation and emotive release. The mythic, scientific and online video culture will met in movements of sensory deprivation and immersion, and invited participants to challenge assumptions and bias about their own perceptual frameworks.

Nwando Ebizie travelled to Recife and work closely with a local museum and cultural centre, Paço do Frevo, which presents the traditional northeast rhythms, such as Frevo and Maracatu, to the surrounding barrio. Her trip also coincided with Rio Carnaval!

“MIR Brazil fulfils a dream of mine to explore Afro-Brazilian ritual music in Recife,” she says. “Working with the musicians, dancers, learning more about Frevo all whilst being immersed in Carnaval is such a perfect opportunity to gain a real understanding of the music culture. This will enrich my research into Afro-diaspora syncretic ritual music and be an invaluable learning experience. I would like to thank British Council, PRSF and Paco de Frevo for this amazing opportunity.”

Listen as they talk with Georgina Godwin in this special podcast recorded when The British Council  brought them all together for the first time after the residencies took place >>