LECTURES
Rootformula approaches lectures as opportunities to share knowledge, question assumptions and explore ideas emerging from our creative practice. Across art, sound, Indigenous knowledge and technology, we bring different perspectives into conversation and encourage deeper engagement with the cultural questions shaping our present and future.
TROPICAL ONTOLOGY
WITS SOAP, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - 2025
Tropical Ontology was a collaborative exhibition by Dr Sechaba Maape, Adey Omotade, and Emalohi Iruobe, held on 7 April 2025. The project explored humanity’s deep connection to the equator as its original home, reframing climate, rhythm, and ritual as ontological forces.
Maape’s AI-generated visuals presented speculative architectures that merged the influences of Pancho Guedes with hyper-essentialised motifs, interrogating African identity through contemporary visual language. Omotade’s “Post-Afrobeat” soundscapes, highly percussive compositions rooted in Yoruba heritage, created a sonic dialogue with the visuals, transforming space into an ontological tropic. Emalohi and Adey’s video works engaged Yoruba ritual practices, expanding the exhibition’s reflection on rhythm, migration, and climate.
Together, Tropical Ontology challenged colonial frontier-making and proposed a conceptual return to the equator: a philosophy of warm weather, sunshine, rhythm, and breeze.
RECLAIMING OUR NAMES
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY, PA, USA - 2024
Is an ever evolving community driven archiving project to protect, remember and record African and indigenous names, reclaim them, their history and importance to identity. Names and naming traditions are ubiquitous cultural practices that herald the beginning of bearers as social beings. Naming is one of the important symbolic resources in which an African indigenous society can express its culture, and it is through name bestowal that history can begin to gather around the name-bearer (Bodenhorn and vom Bruck, 2006).