AYO – interview: Rijksakademie Open Studios

AYO reflects on her upbringing and ancestry in Uganda from her current position as a resident of the Netherlands, using sculpture, sound and performance to create an in-between space of ambiguous, embodied translation

AYO’s installation, A score for Atat's homestead, charts incomplete passages of cultural translation, the arrangement of objects, sounds, and texts suggesting an archipelago. Here, she talks about various kinds of interrelation: between the English of her schooling and the Leb-Lango that is her mother tongue, life in the city and at her grandparents’ homestead in northern Uganda, and life in Uganda and life in the Netherlands. Navigating these crosscurrents, AYO’s phonetic score – or “sound sculpture” – embodies her memory of her grandparents’ homestead, responding to the inadequacy of standardised language to convey memory between cultures. Further establishing a kind of mnemonic materiality of sound are her glass-blown sculptures based on the abu, a traditional Luo musical instrument.

AYO: A score for Atat's homestead, installation view, Rijksakademie Open Studios. Photo: Tomek Dersu Aaron.

AYO: A score for Atat's homestead, installation view, Rijksakademie Open Studios. Photo: Tomek Dersu Aaron.

Interview by TOM DENMAN
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY