Journey Through The Invisible by Emeka Okereke

For about ten days we’ve been on the road. Ten Nigerians – photographers and a writer, traveling across cities, towns and villages on the West of this beautiful continent!

When this idea first struck me sometime in March 2009, it came with a deep urge to experience the raw lands and diverse landscapes of the countries of Africa. Finally, this dream came through in November of the same year.

Today, here we are making the dream more and more real.

It has been an overwhelming experience, one that makes it inevitable to see ourselves as the proverbial guinea pig for an idea and vision we all share at different degrees.

I see it as a performance in which we are the performers, surrendering ourselves to uncertainty in other to ascertain the certain, leaving our chosen life behind for a one of fiction in other people’s reality, self-inflicted parenthesis of a sort.

Our physical and emotional limits constantly stretched.

Some are more elastic than others while one of us got to her yielding point halfway in the journey and took her leave back to Lagos.

This is social art

Like some cases in art creation, though the process might be a fiction, more like a staged act, the resulting experience is real.

It is this real experiencing that keeps me going when certain moments or incidents seem delusional.

When I see the end products of this project, namely: images, written materials, and numerous individuals met through networking, I can’t help but foresee the role this initiative will play in the reshaping of 21st-century Africa if only we remain consistent.

I have no doubt that this is a good thing. The question is: how good are we willing to make it?

Therefore as I sit at the front seat beside Sam the driver, watching the long roads which at some point seem infinite, reveal landscapes, villages towns and cities, I say to myself “Nothing is further than one’s determination to get there”.

No matter how far the journey is, it will reveal a destination!

One day we will look back and reminisce on how it all began and it will seem so far away.

As if the past too is infinite.