Ayo

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SO(N)R is a multifaceted project exploring the materiality of sound when remembering history. Initially, Ayo was drawn to the practice of keening, a nonverbal and melismatic lamentation for the dead coined from the Irish term (Caointeoireacht). Ayo was moved by the illegibility of language and the potency of wails as agents of empathy and transformation in moments of grief; looking at the ceremony of keening as a rite of separation from self, home, and identity. Researching other rituals of lamentation closer to her ancestry, the artist came across a Luo wind instrument called Abu. Abu was made from round gourds stuck together by beeswax and bark. The size of an average human adult, Abu was light enough to be carried from village to village, to announce the deceased within communities.

Ayo has been making mouth-blown glass fabrications of Abu together with Gert Bullee, a master glass blower in Leerdam, mainly because she couldn’t find any recordings of the original sound of the instrument. In collaboration with musician Yanik Soland, Ayo took this limitation as an opportunity to score a new sound of Abu. Together with found home-amateur 8mm film footage from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in the 60s, the sound- and video installation SO(N)R makes use of 16 mm close-ups of the sound-making process in the studio as well as field recordings from Lofoten, to explore sonic lamentations where the sound itself becomes the narrator.

Ayo is a Ugandan-born, Rotterdam-based visual artist interested in enlivening unofficial and official archival materials. She enjoys studying oral records, intangible forms of cultural heritage, and craft practices, among other sources, to build plural worlds favourably presented as multi-media constellations encompassing sculpture, film, and performance. Ayo’s work has been presented at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Art Rotterdam and *Rencontres Internationales Paris & Berlin, among others. She is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL.