Ronny Kinuthia


The Agikuyu and the Trickster
Sound as a visual experiance paradoxing the interplay between what holds the action and what acts as mere consequence.

Ethernet cables, steel, arduino, speakers, candles

Sound sculpture woven from ethernet cables, assembled with two speakers and two candles, emitting a story about cracks holding space for fugitivity. The speakers emit sounds at varying frequencies, causing the candlelight to respond and dance in different formations. This gesture references Akomolafe’s reflections on the fugitive state, in which being is not the encapsulator of matter, but matter is the encapsulator of beings. Similarly, the vibrations created by the speakers are not what cause the candle to vibrate, but rather the air that hosts the space in between.
The sculpture is an interpretation of Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s work on being and non-being. Akomolafe urges us to look within trickery and fugitivity to gain understanding of what might be disregarded or even obliterated in the act of being human. The conventions that are adopted so naturally that we lose sight of them as conventions now sit in proximity to being second nature.

Akomolafe urges us to break those conventions held by the structures we live by, through breaking their sediments, their roots. It is to ask not to sit within the paradigm of humanity, because the idea of humanity within the confinements of societal structure has already revoked you from the possibility to be.

Inspired by Yoruba cosmology, Akomolafe invites us to not see the self as a centralized center of being, but rather as the ephemeral status we consist of, where experiences and events host us and not the other way around.

Here, the analogy of the candle comes into play.