Gustavo Capela

GUSTAVO CAPELA, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was approved funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Sonic Futures: An Ethnographic Investigation of the Aesthetic Politics of the Chicoco Collective in Port Harcourt, Nigeria,” supervised by Dr. James Holston. This research focused on how auto-constructed, informal, settlements that have historically occupied the banks of the Bonny River in the Niger Delta conceptualize an alternative future in an environment of extreme uncertainty. In Port Harcourt, Nigeria, these settlements, locally referred to as “waterfront communities,” face the catastrophic effects of the oil and gas industry in one of the biggest oil-producing nations in the world. These waterfront communities are mainly occupied by riverine tribes: tribes which have organized their livelihoods, rituals, and modes of thought around the waters of the brackish rivers that cut across the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The research found that one of the most profound and ultimately powerful challenges to the oil imaginaries that have shaped Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital, derives its potency from the cosmological stipulations formulated and actualized over centuries by the riverine tribes. The grantee argues that the cosmologies by which these tribes apprehend, conceptualize, structure and organize the world suggests that the alternative to the current oil-order is already existent, centuries of struggle in and against imperialist forces that have shaped the Niger Delta.