There is a Chinua Achebe proverb that Emmanuel Ndefo likes to return to: “A person who doesn’t travel would say that their mother cooks the best soup.” It is, in many ways, the key that unlocks everything about this Lagos-and-Europe-spanning artist — a man whose entire creative practice is built at the crossroads of journeys taken and origins remembered.
Born in 1991 in Sabon-Gari, Kano, in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria, to parents of Igbo origin from the Christian south-east, Ndefo grew up already inhabiting multiple worlds. He was baptised Catholic, educated in a Pentecostal missionary school, grew up speaking Hausa in the streets, Igbo at home, English in the classroom, and Pidgin English with his friends — that outlawed, electric creole that refuses to stay put. To this constellation he has since added French and German, Buddhist mindfulness, and years spent researching Maasai cultural dances in Kenya. He is, by formation and by choice, a man of multiplicities.
It is this “intersection of cultures where negotiation and exchange happens,” as he describes it, that he calls the home of his creativity. Not a fixed address, but a permanent state of transit. A place of tension, indecision, being lost in translation, and the continual searching for a way home.
“what does digital practice look like when African somatic and aesthetic traditions are at its centre rather than its margins?”
African Digital Art and the Question of Aesthetic Sovereignty
The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary flowering of digital art from the African continent and its diaspora — a generation of artists using new technologies not to mimic or catch up with Western digital art traditions, but to forge something substantively different. Ndefo’s practice is in productive dialogue with this wider movement, sharing its core insistence that African artistic forms are not raw material to be processed by international contemporary art frameworks, but complete epistemological systems with their own logics, their own beauty, and their own futures.
What distinguishes the most significant African digital art of this period is precisely this refusal of extractive aesthetics. The body in much African digital practice is not a neutral substrate on which global digital trends are written, but a body that already knows things: things about rhythm and repetition, about the relationship between the individual and the collective, about the interpenetration of the spiritual and the material, about endurance and joy, that Western digital traditions have no adequate vocabulary for. Afrofuturism, in its various iterations across art, music, literature, and film, has helped name some of this territory — but the artists doing the most vital work are often working at a more granular level, asking not just what African futures might look like but what African presents, African bodies, African epistemologies might look like if digital tools were designed from their centre outward rather than applied to them from without.
His work poses a question that African digital art more broadly is forcing onto the agenda of international contemporary art: not “how do African artists engage with digital practice?” but “what does digital practice look like when African somatic and aesthetic traditions are at its centre rather than its margins?”
The Body as Instrument
Ndefo is, first and foremost, a performance and dance artist and researcher. But those words only begin to describe the scope of what he does. His practice treats the body not as a vessel for movement but as an instrument of writing — a living archive through which history, resistance, and transformation are inscribed and re-inscribed. His own artist statement puts it with characteristic precision: he is “an experimental artist, researcher, choreographer and performer working with bodies as instruments of writing and physical resistance.”
At the heart of his enquiry is what he calls “the performative embodiment of ideas, objects and practices” — the way that a body moving through space can activate consciousness, disturb assumptions, and open new ways of being in the world. He is particularly interested in how bodies use space in liberatory and transformative ways: how movement can become a form of freedom rather than mere spectacle.
His formal training in dance research grounds this intellectual ambition in rigorous practice, but Ndefo is deliberately eclectic. He draws on traditional African dances, on hip-hop, krump, and house dance — urban forms that carry their own histories of resistance and joy. He makes a point of refusing to be bound by trends or fashions in the contemporary art world, describing an “open, creative mobility” that allows his work to move from live performance into photography, video installations, and other artistic forms as the work demands.
Motion, Data, and the African Body in Digital Space
The emergence of motion capture and digital animation technologies has opened a particularly charged set of questions for African artists working with the body — and Ndefo is among those engaging most thoughtfully with what is at stake. Motion capture, which converts physical movement into streams of numerical data, is perhaps the most literal manifestation of the body-as-instrument idea. But it also raises urgent questions about whose movements are being captured, in whose archives they are stored, and who controls their afterlife.
The history of Western notation systems for dance — from Labanotation to digital motion libraries — has tended to privilege certain bodies and certain movement vocabularies, encoding European classical and concert dance traditions as the default while treating African and diasporic forms as supplementary or exotic. The result is a digital landscape that is, in its movement DNA, profoundly unequal: the algorithms and datasets that increasingly animate characters in film, gaming, and virtual environments are trained predominantly on Western bodies performing Western movement. When African movement vocabularies do appear — the undulating spine of West African dance, the percussive footwork of South African gumboot, the aerial dynamics of East African warrior traditions — they are often stripped of their cultural context and absorbed as aesthetic novelty.
Ndefo’s practice participates in the growing conversation among African artists and researchers about how digital tools might instead be used to document, preserve, and dynamically extend African movement knowledge. The traditional dances he has spent years researching — complex somatic technologies that carry knowledge about history, ecology, cosmology, and community — are profoundly at risk of being lost in a generation, as urbanisation, displacement, and the pressures of modernity erode the conditions in which they were transmitted. Digital practice offers the possibility not merely of archiving these forms as museum objects, but of making them alive and generative again: source material for new choreographic and digital work that is simultaneously deeply rooted and formally innovative.
This is also the territory where questions about AI and machine learning become most urgent and most interesting for an artist in Ndefo’s position. Generative AI systems trained on movement data encoded primarily from Western bodies will reproduce and amplify existing aesthetic inequalities unless artists, researchers, and institutions actively intervene — building datasets, developing methodologies, and insisting that the African body’s ways of knowing and moving are not peripheral inputs but central architectures. Ndefo’s dual training, in the formal methods of European dance research and in the embodied knowledge of multiple African traditions, gives him a rare capacity to work on both sides of this challenge.
Roots and Routes
The distinction Ndefo draws between roots and routes is more than a linguistic play. It is the conceptual architecture of his entire practice. His roots — Kano, Igbo heritage, the south-east, the north — are not a fixed origin point but are themselves composed of journeys, encounters, and negotiations. The Igbo family in the Hausa city. The Catholic child in the Pentecostal school. The English speaker who was punished for speaking it wrong.
His routes — the residencies, the research journeys, the institutional collaborations across three continents — extend and complicate those roots without ever severing them. Since 2017, when he presented research at the Centre nationale de la Danse in Paris, Ndefo has moved through an extraordinary range of contexts: the Transformatorio art festival in Sicily (2018), Villa Karo in the Benin Republic (2022), the Center for Contemporary Art Lagos (2022), Kampnagel in Hamburg (2023), Kunstwerk Köln (2023), Pact Zollverein in Essen (2023), the Turku New Performance Biennale in Finland (2023), and the Raid Festival in Salerno, Italy (2023), among others.
Two works in particular have anchored Ndefo’s international reputation. Traces of Ecstasy explores the residues that transformative experiences leave on the body — the way joy, grief, or spiritual states are not just felt but physically inscribed. It is a work rooted in Ndefo’s interest in what he calls “the historical and contemporary formats of rupture, queerness, resistance and subversion within indigenous performance practices.”
The Passage extends this inquiry into questions of crossing — of thresholds, transitions, and the borderlands between states of being. Both works demonstrate Ndefo’s characteristic approach: intellectual rigour married to visceral physical presence, with formal innovation that never loses touch with the body’s essential humanity.
Emmanuel Ndefo lives and works between Nigeria and Europe. His work spans live performance, choreography, video installation, and photography.
