LECTURES
Rootformula’s lectures and public knowledge exchange programmes bring artists, researchers, cultural practitioners and audiences together around ideas shaping contemporary culture.
Conversations explore art, sound, Indigenous knowledge, cultural research, creative practice, technology, community and the evolving relationship between culture and society. Rootformula creates spaces where knowledge can move between disciplines, generations and creative communities.
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).
