I write now for all who keep their lives outside. Clothes are like a trace on paper—they tell of their owner’s trajectory. And what trajectory is visible in these photographs of clothes hanging outside, absent of their owners?

Today the image is often believed more than one’s own eyes. Yet the once sacred image is no longer primarily preserved in houses of worship but is stored in server farms in the Midwest. How does where the image is housed impact our belief in it? An etymological investigation beginning with belief offers insight, creating a constellation in the shape of the hieroglyph for house.

My dear Alheri, let us sit together at this table, you and I. Do you remember the first time we met? It was in Uyo, at the NYSC Camp—everyone from everywhere in the country, poured together into the same pot. It was inevitable: you, boisterous, a full Northern woman and I, curious, a man from the South. Oh, those heady days.

Part One of an interview series “Interior Conversations”. This conversation is with Lesley-Anne Cao, an artist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Among the subjects of this conversation is on working with detritus and the struggles of being an artist.

The square, in order to be destroyed, requires more than a slip or an accident. One will have to smash it with a weapon or take it apart with a tool; there is the element of choice and control— so violent and so human. Yet here, we may also find the edge of comfort and familiarity, the limits of constraint.

I. Once, in Maiduguri, I visited a photo studio. It was 2016 and Boko Haram had eaten deep into the city. Buildings were half blown up, charred, taken over by the military. Streets were deserted and under close watch by the Civilian Joint Task Force. The owner of the studio—a young man in his 30s—had come from Jos about 7 […]

A cross-stitched heirloom quilt provides a geometric medium to topologically explore my Midwestern ancestry.

It is election year in his country. The things he remembers—things he wants to forget—wake him up at the other end of the ocean.

Home is the warm hand that had hovered above you in the earliest moments of your life and which has left its edifying imprint upon you. I speak of the warm hand as if it were a constant. There are instances when it is not.