AYO AKINGBADE

Ayo Akingbade is an artist, writer and film director who lives and works in London – her films have been shown at Cannes Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen among others. The artist works predominantly with moving image, addressing notions of power, urbanism and stance. Interested in the fluid boundaries between the self and the other, she gathers local and cultural experiences in intimate and playful interpretations.

During the lecture, we were shown clips of some of her films and she shared the techniques of her filmmaking. Firstly she doesn’t make storyboards to plan out the ways her film will play out. She explained that they were not useful for her as she could clearly envision what she wanted to achieve when making them. Seeing as for this project my plan is to make a series of short films, I really like the idea of not having an exact plan to follow. More often than not, most of my works have been the most successful when unplanned occurrences would happen.

The artist also explained that a lot of her films came to reality because she would follow through with intrigue – she was driving past a factory at night and wanted to see inside and how the factory runs. So she did. The people there were alerted that they would be filming but there was no script – they were not told what to do; almost like a silent documentary.

Below are a few images of the artists style. She often shoots on film as she feels it to be more permanent and durable.

Toward the end of the lecture she gave a lot of advice for us students – to trust ourselves and our gut instincts – of there is something that inspires us and we have the drive to make it- we should follow our impulses. For me this was like a wake up call as I could envision some possible film ideas for my surreal exhibition. I had ideas that made me excited and felt like it was very me and my style. So that night I went home and made a list of objects I needed to make these films a reality. Keep an eye out for Lobster Man and You want to play chess where?…