Nkeiruka Oruche is a cultural organizer, producer and multidisciplinary artist, specializing in Pan Afro-Urban culture and its intersections with personal identity, public wealth and sociopolitical action. Currently, she is focused on expanding and sustaining grassroots change-making and community health through work as co-founder of BoomShake, and Afro Urban Society, and as Artistic Director of Gbedu Town Radio.
About this Project
‘Mixtape of the Dead & Gone #1’- Egwu Onwu Ahamefula
Every track must come to an end, but you don’t have to.
If your final journey is to the land of ancestors, what would you leave behind? What would you take with you?
When Ahamefula is faced with these questions, posed by #7, a Messenger on ‘Onye Ozi’ Ancestor app, sent to collect them, their first instinct is to run, until #7 offers Ahamefula a chance not to be forgotten. Afro Urban Society & CounterPulse present ‘Mixtape of the Dead & Gone #1’, a shit-just-got-real Afro-Urban dance-theater tale exploring the limits of stunting and reality, vibes and inshallah, legacy, heartbreak, and acceptance.
egwu ọnwụ Ahamefula is the first stage in the ‘Egwu Onwu: Mixtape for the Dead’ (MDG) series as part of the ‘Obi gbawara’m//My Heart Shattered or What happens after I die?’ (OGB) project. Created and facilitated by multimedium cultural artist and producer Nkeiruka Oruche, OGB is a multimedia performance, & cultural reclamation project reactivating the practice of death and grief performance from the Igbo Ọdịnanị & Ọmenala tradition. Drawing from pre-colonial Igbo traditional forms, as a point of departure, MDG will recreate & reimagine grief songs, dances, and poems remixed with Pan Afro-urban forms to explore the questions How do we hold pain, grief & joy for ourselves & as a community? How do we define & self-determine our liberatory practices? And how do we remember who we are in societies designed to make us forget?
MDG/OGB is created through the methodologies of first-hand living, reading, oral narrative, immersive travel, interviews, apprenticeship, and community gatherings. The project involveS bringing together Indigenous Igbo and other Diaspora Black folks: everyday people, artists, cultural practitioners, community organizers, and scholars based in the Bay Area as well as back in Ala Igbo (Igbo land), and other parts of the diaspora.
The full project will materialize as a multi-faceted series of ceremonies, visual installations, multimedia performances, workshops & interactive sessions, and an experimental docu-dance film.
To learn more about the project visit nkeirukaoruche.com/ogb
Photo Credit: Ashley Ross
Learn more about the ARC Edge 2022 Residency Presentation
featuring Audrey Johnson & Nkeiruka Oruche
Thursday – Saturday June 2-4 & 9-11, 2022