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Explainer video exploring the work of pioneering Nigerian architect and artist Demas Nwoko, and how his philosophy of "New Culture" and the "Natural Synthesis" movement he was a part of prefigured the modern Solarpunk movement by decades. The video is a NotebookLM generated overview of Ayodele Arigbabu's article titled - Protopian African Futures: Demas Nwoko’s Tropical Architecture, Natural Synthesis—and Solarpunk - published in eTropic journal in April 2025
New Culture Studios, Ibadan, by Demas Nwoko. View of entrance porch at the south wing, showing sculpted columns wind scoops and louvered screen doors that aid the internal thermal regulation. Image by Ayodele Arigbabu.
View of south wing of New Culture Studios, Ibadan, by Demas Nwoko. Image by Ayodele Arigbabu.
Demas Nwoko, solarpunk, and the architectural roots of Forward Remembrance
Demas Nwoko, solarpunk, and the architectural roots of Forward Remembrance
In 2025, Ayodele Arigbabu published Protopian African Futures: Demas Nwoko’s Tropical Architecture, Natural Synthesis—and Solarpunk in eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics. The paper can be read through the journal here: Protopian African Futures.
The essay draws on Arigbabu’s background in architecture and his earlier experience working with and learning from Demas Nwoko, the Nigerian artist, architect, designer, and theorist whose practice offers a powerful model for thinking about futures from within African material, cultural, and ecological conditions.
Rather than treating solarpunk as a style imported from elsewhere, the paper asks how African architectural and artistic traditions already contain practices that resonate with protopian future-making: incremental, situated, adaptive, and grounded in what is already available. Through Nwoko’s work, Arigbabu considers how buildings, materials, climate, craft, and cultural memory can become instruments for imagining futures that are neither nostalgic nor techno-utopian.
For the wider Forward Remembrance trajectory, the paper helped clarify an important shift: utopia does not need to be imagined as a finished perfect state. It can be approached as a latent possibility, staged through existing cultural resources and activated through practice. This is where protopia, solarpunk, and Metapunkt begin to meet.
The paper also connects architectural thinking to the later development of Stochastic Dreams and Synesyn. In each case, the question is how futures become inhabitable before they become real: through images, scenarios, tools, spaces, rituals, and shared acts of interpretation. Nwoko’s work offered one route into that question, showing how future-facing practice can emerge from local knowledge without being trapped by either tradition or technological spectacle.
Event: Journal publication
Publication: eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics
Paper: Protopian African Futures: Demas Nwoko’s Tropical Architecture, Natural Synthesis—and Solarpunk
Author: Ayodele Arigbabu
Subject: Demas Nwoko, tropical architecture, natural synthesis, solarpunk, protopia, African futures, and Forward Remembrance
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