Metamorphosis: Mutable Origins
Adeyemi Adebayo
March 23rd to May 17th, 2025
For the past decade and beyond, most research on migration has focused on the plight of undocumented immigrants and the theme of illegal migration. However, there is little community-wide documentation of first-generation migrants navigating what it means to build a home away from home.
Concurrently, the current global landscape is one in which more people are likely to seek migration to the West as a result of complex factors, including economic conditions, political instability, religious persecution, and climate crisis. Mutable Origins addresses how migrants navigate within their adopted communities and the subsequent issues they face in the process of settling. It also aims to document the potential conflicts that exist between places of origin and places of residence.
The project asks what it means to be a citizen in one place while concurrently becoming a citizen in another. It addresses how migrants have and continue to navigate being “diversity” coming from a place where they’re not. It also asks whether embedding or naturalization is possible, or whether migrants always have to carve out a space for themselves, building communities of kin and likeness that combine elements of home and abroad and how they achieve this.
Metamorphosis: Mutable Origins is an experimental documentary photography project that explores the experiences of the African diaspora in North America while questioning the mythology of the West as a promised land of potential wealth and endless possibilities. It combines material items brought from their places of origin with newly made portraits and collected oral histories. The visual delineation of these objects represents their individual identities while other objects represent a larger cultural context.
About the artist
Artist’s website: https://paakanni.com
Adeyemi Adebayo is a Nigerian documentary photographer interested in themes of home, belonging, migration and human disposition. He is interested in photography as a means to evaluate moods and dispositions critically, both in the presence of bodies and the potential absence of, as they undergo subjugation, injustice, prejudice, and exploitation, or simply as they migrate. His process as an artist involves walking often and occasionally raising a camera to make photographs. Other times, he asks a subject to let him into their lives, collaborating with them to tell a story.