Editorials
Call and Response: Remi Ajani and Hamed Maiye’s Book of Conversations, Memory and Myth
FF Projects’ limited-edition volume, launched at Alára Lagos on 31 October, sets two Nigerian-British artists in conversation and invites a chorus of voices to answer.
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Call and Response is a 68-page publication from FF Projects that accompanies the exhibition of the same name by Nigerian-British artists Remi Ajani and Hamed Maiye at Alára Lagos. Published in October 2026 in a limited edition of 100 copies, it was launched at the gallery on 31 October.
The book is built around three conversations between the artists, held on 19 May, 29 May and 2 September 2026. Moving between Nigeria and England, they follow connected threads: personal and familial memory, mythologies and the act of creating one’s own realities, and the dance between the transparent and the opaque. Their central question is why anyone should participate in a story that doesn’t care for them when they can create their own.
A foreword by Faridah Folawiyo opens the volume. Contributions follow from Alayo Akinkugbe, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Duro Olowu, Kelechi Anabaraonye, Olukemi Lijadu, Oluwatobiloba Ajayi, Remi Vaughan-Richards, Reni Folawiyo and Tosin Adeosun, alongside the artists’ own collage, drawings and photographs. They write of growing up at UNILAG in the 1970s, the return of Mami Wata, the power of indigenous religion, the craftsmanship of returnees, ever-stylish grandparents, soft childhood Sundays, the ancestral wisdom of aunties and the everyday beauty of Lagos. FF Projects describes it as “part archive, part act of myth-making”.
The conversations are the book’s spine. In the second, recorded on 29 May, the artists begin with legitimacy and the canon, and arrive at Sun Ra and the invention of myth. An extract follows.
From Conversation II, 29 May 2026
REMI AJANI: We were just speaking about all these little things that happen that kind of tame you into submission, into playing your part.
HAMED MAIYE: It reminds me of something I've brought up over and over again: how people sometimes need a proxy to understand and access your work.
I've told you about when I went to Corvi Mora to see Lynette's show. There was this art guy there who said he wasn't into the work, and then slowly started liking it because he realised she was referencing three white male artists from the canon.
He was like, “Oh, I love how she does Constable.”
And it was really interesting to be on the other side of that. You're only legitimised through a Western predecessor, or through referencing a certain person.
In theory, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's about continuation, craft and legacy. But when you can only be legitimised through a Western lens, what happens to all your other reference points and lived experiences?
RA: Right. And how does that make you feel, as someone who doesn't even reference—
HM: I suppose I do reference artists who have referenced the European canon in one way or another. My only experience of being formally taught was at college, and that was my introduction to people like Goya.
I found the technical and classical stuff interesting, but I'm more interested in artists who are grounded in feeling. Some sort of out-of-body experience. An image that makes you move and shake and feel something takes priority over classical training.
[…]
HM: That actually connects to something that came up for me after our last conversation: this recurring idea of myth.
I've got this yearly tradition of rewatching Space Is the Place. I watched it again recently, and I was thinking about Sun Ra.
There's a moment where people question him: “How do we know what you're saying is true?”
And his whole embodiment is about choosing to opt into another myth. He's saying he's not from Earth.
If you looked at our existence from the outside, you could say we're all participating in some sort of agreement that we have to live this way. There are all these invented systems that we are collectively allowed to exist.
Sun Ra is saying: I don't have to abide by that.
So what does it actually mean to choose to opt into something else?
RA: That's powerful. And in a really weird way, I think that's what we're trying to do as artists.
Extract from Call and Response, Conversation II, pp. 16–17, FF Projects, 2026. Reproduced with the permission of the artists and FF Projects.
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