Question
Now that you have left Lagos, what happened with your museum?

Junkman
Very interesting. I was in Brussels exhibiting the work I showed you, ‘The Face of the City’, when I got a phone call, you must hurry back now, they are destroying your ‘Junkyard’! You shouldn’t be surprised, because I was almost every day on TV and in the newspapers and on the radio, the media people wanted excitement, so they came recycling the things I had saved, and I didn’t say what things should be saved, so I wasn’t surprised when I was called to say they were destroying your junkyard. It’s my own land and my own property, so nobody has a right to do that, but it was possible, because they raised the rumour that I was caught with eight human heads, as a ritualist, and then I was in the prison in Nigeria, therefore, if he’s a ritualist, he must be brought down. To cut the story short, ‘The Junkyard’ went back to where it came from – until I go back.

Question
There’s something incredibly poignant about your work, but I do have a question that’s based on my anxiety about what happens to a work made in a country with the kinds of problems you’ve described in Nigeria; when that work then gets shown in a Western gallery or museum, do you have an anxiety that maybe it just gets treated in the end as entertainment for a Western audience?

Junkman
I don’t have this anxiety, because I don’t chase what is out of my reach, so I don’t care what happens to a work once it is out of my reach, otherwise I would have hyper-tension, worrying about it.

Transcribed by Jackie Howson and edited by Marion Endt.