In Igbo cosmology, memory is not merely recall; it is responsibility: to honour, and to restore.
This axiom resonates through From Ruins to Remembrance, the second edition of the Enugu Photo Festival, curated by Chidera Sam-Eze, which ran from November 11 to November 22, 2025.
Mounting an exhibition on ruins inside a ruin is a curatorial gesture that is simply genius.
By staging the exhibition in the dilapidated Public Works Department (PWD) Building, a structure itself on the verge of decay, the festival doesn’t merely show ruins; it inhabits them. Caved-in ceilings, imposing brick pillars, red bricks, and gigantic cobwebs dense enough to suspend a man. Piles of disused administrative papers – minutes, reports, invoices and receipts, dating as far back as 1973, rest in dusty heaps, exposed, waiting to be burned. All tangible proof that erasure is neither abstract nor inevitable, but deliberate. Walking through the PWD Building, the festival’s theme stops feeling like curatorial theory and begins to feel like urgent work.
Across seven photographers, a cloth installation, and Igbo traditional instruments the festival builds a tapestry of how ruins hold meaning, how they endure, and how easily they can be lost.
Sophia Abubakar revisits Enugu’s industrial past: pottery sites at Iva Valley and Ogidi, once thriving hubs of communal craft, now abandoned. What she photographs is not merely architectural decay but the death of communal and local craftsmanship. Her images, however, show hope by capturing a photograph of a formerly decayed building renovated by SLANG (Spanish Language Association of Nigeria), serving a new generation. Her work asks: who bears the burden of restoration?
Muhammad Shehu, in contrast, directs our gaze north, to Arewa architecture. His photographs of earthen buildings, intricate geometric patterns, and fading color speak to a cultural archive under threat. As modern construction spreads, Shehu’s images feel like an act of preservation, checking preference for foreign alternatives.
Ọlájídé Ayẹni goes westward. “His Make Way for Me” project captures Lagos amid infrastructural upheaval – rail expansions, and widening roads, showing how “development” can erase communities. Ayẹni’s photographs are razor-sharp insights on how such projects are not entirely neutral developments, but can reshape relationships, displace homes and disrupt familiarity.
Ismail Odetola turns away from people to objects and traces, creating meditative portraits of towns across Southwest Nigeria. His images suggest that ruins hold more than what is easily visible: the collision of ancient and modern, and the residue of life lived.
Ene Ochayi visits Swange Cinema in Benue, a once-lively cultural hub now silenced. Her photos, tender, and haunting, evoke the collective loss of gathering and laughter. The empty and dark hallways and dusty seats become elegies: for both architecture, and community.
Mayowa Oyewale brings us into the monumental Adebisi Mansion, a colonial relic with 99 rooms. Walking through with the great-grandson of Chief Sanusi Adebisi, she photographs the crockery, the corridors, the peeling walls, everything still bearing a family’s dignity and neglect. His lens seem to pose the question: how do we treat our monumental histories when they become monuments only of decay?
Finally, Ayogu Wilfred directs us to Zik’s Flats, a generous gift to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, from Nnamdi Azikiwe. Built for community with shops, playgrounds, restaurants, the Flats now sit hollow, devoid of the life they were meant to house. Wilfred’s images are stark, and although he insists that the buildings still carry the echoes of the past, the laughter of students, the movement of everyday life, and the dream of a brighter future for education, it is very hard to imagine.
There is Akwaete, soft but unignorable. Not architecture, but fabric. Not ruin, but craft. It hung with authority: colour, geometry, tradition woven into textile. I thought of my friend, Ifeoma, who owns an Akwaete cloth that cost nearly her entire monthly salary. We laugh each time she tells the story, but beneath the laughter is a question: How does an art form that was once a common skill become so rare that only a handful of women still practice it?
What emerges from this confluence is an exhibition of emotional and intellectual breadth. Across the artists, there is coherence, despite geographical and formal differences. From Ruins to Remembrance is in that sense a wake-up call. The festival holds up ruins not to glamorise decay, but to demand accountability: for heritage, for neglect, and for stories that risk being forgotten.
Walking out of the PWD Building, you do not feel like a bystander. You feel implicated. And that, perhaps, is the most powerful restoration this festival offers.
***Anulika Iwoba is a Culture and Heritage Manager
