Object As...with Ebitenyefa Baralaye

“I wonder where is all my relation. Friendship to all and every nation.” 

—David Drake

 

Ancestry and family are profound values in Baralaye's life, but the terms also have a degree of opacity. An understanding of “one’s people” touches on broad ideas of community, history, place, and value that shape a sense of belonging and being. We ultimately belong less to those broad entities than to the specific people and the distinct faces, voices, and bodies, known and unknown, chosen and unchosen, that compose what the 19th-century potter David Drake, enslaved in South Carolina, calls our “relation.”

 

As a part of a diaspora removed since birth from Nigeria and its culture, Baralaye sees “my relation” in the faces of the family members he knows but also in the imagined faces of those on his family tree whom he has yet to meet or never will. All My Relation: I gives distinct features to this unknown segment of Baralaye's relation while acknowledging that they are both unclear and persistent in his mind.

 

American Craft Podcast thanks our guest, Ebitenyefa Baralaye. See more of his work at baralaye.com and follow @baralaye.

American Craft Podcast also thanks our host and producer Sarah Rachel Brown from perceivedvaluepodcast.com. Follow @sarahrachelbrown.

Music is produced by Hamilton Boyce. Find him at hamiltonboyce.com and follow @hamiltonboyce.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov. American Craft Podcast is property of the American Craft Council at craftcouncil.org. Your support through membership and contributions is appreciated.

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