The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 7: Phillip Ihenacho
“West African culture is starting to become the future,” says Phillip Ihenacho, the director of the newly established Museum of West African Art. What if you built a new museum in West Africa, where a glorious ancient history contrasts with a brutal colonial one? What if we really considered the full meaning of restitution and repair? Can a cultural organization build a stable financial future by becoming its own landlord? Phillip and his team are building not just a new museum — but an entire neighborhood set within the ancient walls of Benin City in Edo. Phillip talks to us about how talent and creativity are thriving in West Africa, where 70% of the population is under 30 and he talks frankly about the challenges of developing opportunities and infrastructure. This is an “incredibly important moment”, Phillip says. “We need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it.”
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, I’m your host Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast all about imagining different futures.
[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we’re joined by Phillip Ihenacho, the director of the Museum of West African Art in Benin City in Nigeria. We’ll talk to Phillip about planning an archaeological project on a site where a glorious ancient history contrasts with a brutal recent colonial one. He talks to us about how talent and creativity are thriving in West Africa—where 70% of the population is under 30—and he talks frankly about the challenges of developing opportunities and infrastructure. Phillip’s unusual background, a trained lawyer with twenty years’ experience negotiating investments in Africa stands him in good stead for this project, which is enormously ambitious. This is not just a museum but an entire neighborhood. Because at the heart of the business model is the need for the institution to be its own landlord. We discuss important partnerships within and outside of Nigeria, working with international museums and governments, and plans for exhibiting at the Venice Biennale.
Phillip’s interview, for me, is a really wonderful, generous, and gracious example of how a person can approach the future hopefully by engaging with the past in thoughtful and elegant ways—for example, the real meaning of restitution and repair.
The show has a bit of everything from balancing the budgets to emotional moments. Let’s dive in.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So this podcast is called The Art World. What If…?!, and you are building one. What if you built a new museum in West Africa? What does it need to be? What do you think a museum in West Africa needs to be and do?
Phillip Ihenacho: I think the challenges that we have in Africa generally, is that because of the situation where there's still huge gaps in terms of education, healthcare, the challenge you face when you are looking at things like museums or arts and culture, infrastructure is that if you're not careful, you come across as being involved with something that is not essential or that ignores the more essential things around you. So why should you spend money on a museum when you've got hospitals without proper equipment?
So to be relevant in an African context, a museum needs to address issues and concerns of Africans today, and in Nigeria, we have a huge growing young population, how they can achieve their ambitions in today's world. We want to create a space that allows them opportunities, gives them relevant experience, and provides a platform also for showcasing their talent, and at the same time connects them to history that hopefully will inspire and connect with the things that they're thinking about today.
Charlotte Burns: In Nigeria, around 70% of the population of more than 200 million people are under the age of 30.
Phillip Ihenacho: That's correct.
Charlotte Burns: Which is a staggering number of people.
Museums that kind of have a crisis of relevance around the world. Are young people in Nigeria interested in museums, do you think?
Phillip Ihenacho: Generally not. Government has underinvested in museum infrastructure. Most young Nigerians experience with the museum is a place that they go as part of a classroom experience, to a building that holds some old objects in glass vitrines and they're told not to touch anything. And then they're released after half an hour back into freedom. They're not places of great interest and in many ways when I first got involved with this project, one of the big debates we had was whether to even call ourselves a museum.
One of my concerns was that the word museum had certain connotations and would immediately put us into a position that to be perceived in a way that we don't want to be perceived. But there's some good connotations about museums, which I think are very important, especially in Nigeria today. The arts and culture space is starting to thrive. There are art fairs and galleries, in Lagos in particular, that really have begun to generate huge interest around West African art. But there's still a missing piece. There's a lack of investment in curators, historians, institutional collectors and that is the traditional role of a museum and that is something that I think is really important, that the term “museum” implies a certain level of seriousness and a certain level of investment that goes beyond commercial. So we decided to keep “museum” in our name but try to redefine the term to be relevant in an African context.
Charlotte Burns: So Nigeria's the most populous nation in Africa. It's predicted to be the third most populous country in the world by 2050. Predicted to reach a population of 411 million according to the United Nations. Like you say, the infrastructure isn't growing in tandem. How do you use your finance background to think through those problems now in your cultural context?
Phillip Ihenacho: One of the biggest challenges that Nigeria face is jobs and creation of futures for young Nigerians. And one of the great things is that arts and culture space can create a significant number of jobs. So one of the things that's quite striking is we have an investment in my private world, in a power plant in Benin. It's a $750 million investment. That probably employs about 150 people and if you compare that to let's say, putting in place a museum infrastructure, which let's say worst case costs $75 million, one-tenth the cost. But we reckon we will create around 20,000 jobs directly and indirectly. So for one-tenth the investment, you can create many times more jobs. And that is because arts and culture creates magnets to attract people into a space, creates opportunities for restaurants, for hotels, for taxi drivers, for artisans, for whole range of people and Nigerians already have a strong tradition of arts and culture. We already have, whether it's filmmaking or music or arts, a strong reputation. It's one of Nigeria's competitive advantages despite the fact that there is so little infrastructure to support creatives. So we believe if we can create infrastructure, more opportunities, more platforms for creators, we can really work to accelerate some of the growth and opportunities.
Charlotte Burns: Phillip, I like the way you do the comparison there of the power plant to the art museum and break those numbers down. Obviously, you worked in finance, I think for around 20 years. You did your BA [Bachelor of Arts] at Yale [University] before graduating from Harvard Law [School]. You worked for McKinsey [& Company] in various places around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that background?
Phillip Ihenacho: I'm a lawyer by training, but I never practiced law. I've been one of these people who never really knew what they wanted to do, have various passions—mainly in environmental conservation issues. So this art world is relatively recent for me. I think in another life I would've been an archeologist or a historian. I studied histories as my first degree. I've always been very interested in ancient African kingdoms and that is probably part of the reason I was asked to raise money for this project.
In my business world, we invested in a power plant just outside of Benin City, and during the construction phase, we had the fortune, or at the time seemed to be a misfortune of stumbling across some of the Benin earthworks. So when we were clearing the land, we came across these old walls and moats, which actually date from the 12th century and it was a disaster because you are about to do construction work and you come across something that you really wish didn't exist the way it was. But it was very interesting. So we had archeologists come in, we had to reconfigure the location of the project. But it got me much more interested in the Benin kingdom in particular.
So one thing led to another. I was then asked to help raise money for museum infrastructure in Benin. And that's how I got involved with this.
Charlotte Burns: And that's led you to this podcast called The Art World: What If…?!. Strange where things lead you.
How is it being a finance person working in the art world? What are the things that you find freeing about moving into a cultural space and what are the things that you find frustrating?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I hate to be termed a finance person because I, yes, I did work in finance, but I've never regarded myself as a finance person.
Charlotte Burns: Sorry, I shouldn't do that. Then tell me why? What is it, what does a finance person imply that you don't like?
Phillip Ihenacho: So a finance person sometimes implies that you are interested in money and I've never really been interested in money. I've been interested in trying to attract investment into Africa, and to demonstrate that it is possible to make a return on your investment in places like Africa, that Africa is not a place that is sitting, waiting for handouts all the time. That has been a big motivator for me for a long period of time. In order to do that, you have to be in the world of finance and I'm reasonably good at raising money for large projects in Africa. That's what I've done for a long time, being the sort of the bridge between international capital and opportunities in Africa. That's what I have enjoyed.
Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you a little bit more about that? Along the way of bringing those opportunities to bear? Where were the most sort of satisfying moments?
Phillip Ihenacho: The most satisfying is if you are involved in something from the very beginning. So you look at something that is on a piece of paper, a plan about doing something, and five years later you've got whatever it is built and hundreds of people employed and generating income and you're making a return for investors. To start with a blank sheet of paper saying you are going to do something that doesn't exist, that is probably the most satisfying.
In many ways, when I was asked to get involved with this museum I thought, okay, it's a sort of similar thing. You just put together a sort of business plan and then you talk to people who give you the money and then you're off to the races. And the easy bit is that they don't even need a return. So they're giving you money and you don't even have to give it back. That seems pretty easy actually. What you have to deliver is a different type of return, an impact on communities, an impact in terms of infrastructure. So in some ways, it is similar.
The thing that I struggled the most with in the, not just the arts and culture world, but in the philanthropic world, is that compared to the sorts of investors that I deal with large foundations and so on, they're harder institutions to get to make decisions in a timely fashion. The other thing that's difficult for me is an element of fundraising is approaching individuals, some of whom are friends and I'm always nervous that they're gonna start crossing to the other side of the street when they see me coming because they're thinking that I'm gonna try and hit them up for money. Approaching individuals for philanthropic causes is a delicate process, let's put it that way.
The third thing that is difficult in the philanthropic world is building an organization where you are going to be dependent on future philanthropy in order to keep the organization alive, for me, is a very, it's a precarious way of setting up an enterprise and I think over the long run, particularly in Africa, thinking creatively about how that entity generates some income that allows it to cover some of its costs, ideally all of its costs, so that you're not having to raise money in order to pay salaries is extremely important.
Charlotte Burns: I don't know that's unique to Africa. It's a big conversation in America, which relies so much on private philanthropy. About what that means when you are then so reliant on a handful of private philanthropists in the UK and in parts of Europe you're reliant on state funding. And there are obviously conditions that come with that. We've seen recently in China, there's been a spate of closures of private museums because there were not plans made for leaner times. So it’s sensible to be thinking of what happens when you’re opening the museum.
What kind of models are you looking at? Because I'm sure that these are models for the future that could conceivably be adopted far more widely.
Phillip Ihenacho: So one of the things that I did very early on—because I was obviously very underqualified to be trying to raise money for a museum—is talk to lots of museums around the world. And one of the questions I asked them always was, “What would you do if you were us?” And, “If you could change something about your own museum, what would you change?” And one of the strong themes that came out of, from many of the museums across the world, even from museums that I imagined to be successful commercially, there's always a long queue and it seems quite expensive to get into the museum, you imagine that they must make some money, and you then find out that they're losing massive amounts of money.
What a lot of them said was, “Museums lose money but they create an enormous amount of value for their neighborhoods,” and “If we were you, we would try to own as much of the neighborhood as possible before building the museum.” So it's the cafes, the restaurants, the hotels, the retail outlets around the museum that make money. And the museum essentially subsidizes that. So it's the loss leader and the value is captured outside the museum.
So one of the things that we have done is we have acquired a relatively significant amount of land, far more than we need for the, let's say the core museum, and we are creating a campus that includes a boutique hotel. We'll include retail space. We'll include commercial space, and we'll include a series of different exhibition spaces, studios, and so on. Some of those spaces will be not-for-profit spaces. Some will be for-profit and the idea is that the income generated essentially as a landlord is used to meet some of the running costs of the museum. I'm not saying it's easy. I know a lot of museums have tried bits of this already, but if you're starting from scratch, you have an opportunity to think about that and build that into your strategy from day one. So my personal goal would be that in five years from now, the basic running costs, the core operational costs of the museum are met through income that is generated by the foundation that owns the museum and the infrastructure around it.
The great thing about it also is that it ties to another thing a lot of museums said. A lot of museums said, “We're like little islands. We're not connected enough to our neighborhoods,” and particularly museums that are very successful in terms of international tourism. You get this horrible effect where all the people coming into the museum are from the outside and there are very few people who are actually in the immediate neighborhood coming in. And I think it's incredibly important that it's almost the other way around. You want to be as connected as possible to your immediate neighborhood and then you want the kind of outside visitors to be the icing on the cake as opposed to the cake itself because otherwise you do become a little island. And again, if you have the ability to curate your neighborhood a little bit because you are a kind of landlord, that allows you to do some of that and make more connections, explicit connections with your neighborhood, try to create public space as well as private space that invites people to walk across your campus, that invites school children and others who may not want to actually come into the main museum building, but you can pull them into your neighborhood and find something for them to do that is around, and that has a link to your cause but isn't necessarily museum in the strict definition of the word.
Charlotte Burns: So it's more about the kind of core cultural values.
Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. And one of the things that was interesting to me was a lot of them when I asked them, “What are the things that you do that connect you with your neighborhoods? What are the things that are most successful?” One of the things that came out, which I wasn't expecting, is sports infrastructure; football field, skateboard park, basketball park, things like that where people in the neighborhood who are looking for a place to get together can come together in an informal and relatively disorganized fashion so they don't have to buy tickets and do all this kind of stuff. And my first reaction, “Well, okay, but that's sports, that's not really arts and culture.” But why do you have to have these strict lines between sports and art?
Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting too because actually if you look at some of the very real estate-led cultural districts that have failed, that feel very synthetic, there's quite a few of these particularly in parts of Asia…
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: …I think it might be something to do with what you're getting towards this informality of sports, and it reminds me of investment in the tech world right now in sports and in culture and it's this idea of the algorithmic world, and sports and culture being a kind of antidote to the increasingly predictable nature of algorithms. And so if you think of the deal that Apple struck with [Lionel] Messi, that he's a revenue generator for Apple because you don't know if a sports player is gonna strike a goal. It's a human endeavor. You can't really write the script for it. There's a kind of coalescence around sporting events and art events as human things. And so I think it's interesting that you would mention that the cultural districts have been connected through sports and art.
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. We're not there yet. We're still in the very, very early days where, hopefully, November we will have our first building open. But this is a 10-year journey. And in many ways, a lot of things which are apparent weaknesses that we have—I think over time will be strengths—we don't have all the money we need to finish a whole district so it forces us to go slowly and gives us time therefore to experiment, see how things go, change things, talk to communities more intensively.
And the other huge advantage we have obviously is that we have no collection. Our mandate isn't to showcase some fantastic collection that some very wealthy person or government wishes to show the world. We can start with nothing and we can therefore be very deliberate about what we want in our collection, how large a collection we want, how much we want on loans versus to own. We can be very deliberate about collection strategy.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: The thinking about the museum is obviously, as you're saying, it's really evolved because when the museum first came to international attention, it was called something different. And it started life as an organization that was focused on bringing back the Benin bronzes but its mission is changing. It had a different architect, it was meant to be a different thing. So it's changing over time. How much do you wanna talk about that? How much do you wanna move past that quickly?
Phillip Ihenacho: I'm happy to talk about it, happy to talk about it. So let's start with the mission of the museum. One of the things that is very frustrating is if you were to go back and look at what our original mission was, that mission has not changed. But because we were formed effectively from a dialogue that was happening around the Benin bronzes, and because the West has been so focused on the story about the restitution of Benin bronzes, no matter what we said, we were always described as the museum where the Benin bronzes are going.
Charlotte Burns: That museum.
Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. We were hoping that we could provide some infrastructure that would allow us to host some of the return objects, and yes, we hoped that we would have the ability to showcase a significant number of restituted Benin bronzes, but from the beginning, to come to our name, we were the “Edo Museum of West African Art” not the “Edo Museum of Benin Bronzes.” So we have always said we want to be West African in scope, and we also want to cover ancient to contemporary and that has not changed.
In many ways, it's absurd to think that you would build something on the basis of things that you are hoping you might one day be given back. How do you plan for that? And also you come to Nigeria, the one thing that you see very quickly is that the problem we have in the arts and culture space both in the contemporary modern as well as the ancient, is not a lack of art. That is not our problem. Our problem isn't that we don't have objects and they have all been taken out of Nigeria. The problem is we don't have infrastructure to showcase, preserve and research, and provide a platform for the great cultural objects that we have. So even if there's not one single restituted object from the West that comes to Nigeria, Nigeria still has incredible objects that are languishing in store rooms, that have inadequate exhibition space, and that deserve a place in the sun. And that is immediately apparent to anybody who spends any time amongst museums in Nigeria. There's a huge need for what we're doing irrespective of restitution.
So we very quickly came to the conclusion, number one is being termed the “Benin Bronze Museum” was a really bad idea. And then to make things worse, we got off to a reasonably rough start with the Royal Palace [of the Oba of Benin]. There was a perception on their side that we were somehow the other trying to compete for ownership of objects and so on and that was exacerbated by some of the Western press that kept talking about how all of the Benin bronzes were coming to us, which was never the case. We said from the beginning, we can hold objects only with the permission of the relevant, kind of authorities. We learned very quickly that it's important that if we were to achieve our true mission—which is a West African museum—is that we need to go out of our way to focus on delivering that message because otherwise we will be labeled as the “Benin Bronze Museum.”
Our name change, we dropped “Edo” out of our name. That is to do more with local things in Nigeria. Quite often a lot of people assume that we were owned by the Edo State government, so that was really the reason why we dropped that. And also, again, emphasizing our West Africa scope.
So we are building from where we started as opposed to abandoning where we started. I think we're very privileged to be in Benin City, which is the heart of the ancient kingdom of Benin. And if you were to talk to the governor of Edo State, he would immediately say, “Yes, we are the Florence or the Venice of West Africa.” At its height, the palace supported over 40 guilds, wood carvers, ivory carvers, bronze casters. So there was a great tradition of supporting arts and artisans in Benin. Our location is the appropriate location for what we're trying to do, which is to support arts and culture today.
Charlotte Burns: When I read the article that you wrote for The Art Newspaper in 2023, you talked about restitution, which is always one of art journalists’ favorite subjects to read or write about. What I found so interesting was that the way you talked about the Benin bronzes—which is a subject I, for instance, have been reading or writing about for years and years—was you so successfully said, “What if you all just accepted that you're writing about restitution in completely the wrong way?” That's what it made me think. What if everybody's just talking about restitution in completely the wrong way? Because what was stolen is much bigger than the Benin bronzes, and can't ever really be restituted properly.
You also said something that was so important, of the nuances and the responsibilities and the overlapping delicate balances between federal, state, and community leaderships that aren't recognized by the Western press. You said, “There will be debate and disagreement about appropriate outcomes and that will take a long time to resolve. And this is only natural.” And then you said that, “It seems fine for the West to take more than a hundred years to even begin to act on restitution, but unforgivable that Nigeria does not resolve complex domestic and historical issues instantaneously.” And I thought this was perfectly put because of course the West is just beginning to discuss, possibly returning possibly some things, and the idea that there may be discussion about what to do with those objects. It was like, you guys haven't got your stuff together, we're not even gonna give it back then.
I love the idea that the conversation around restitution, that we should have now on this show should be a different conversation around restitution and that in fact, restitution might even mean something different and that you could shape it in a different way.
That the term is not just about artifacts, but networks, skill sets, opportunities, place, an exchange, and all these other things that you've written so brilliantly about in some of the things you've said in the past. Not to put you on the spot.
Phillip Ihenacho: So when I got involved with all this stuff, one of the things I did was I actually went and looked at the definition of what restitution is. There's two different meanings. One meaning has to do with the repair of a wrong. So it is about making something good that you somehow they have made bad. The other definition of restitution is about the return of something. So the giving back of something that was taken. I'm much more interested in the former than the latter.
Nigeria has a huge wealth of objects, so returning objects alone is not making good what the damage was and the damage that was caused. The analogy for me is, okay, let's say Benin bronzes were manufactured in a factory and you came along and you bombed the factory and you took some of the bronzes that were in the factory out and you carted them off and you sold them and whatever. The bigger tragedy is not the objects that were taken from the factory. The bigger tragedy is the destruction of the factory that enables people to create those objects. And what happened in colonial days was a replacement of traditional ways of organizing society, taxation, traditional rulers, replacing that with a quote-unquote modern means of governance with parliaments and state governments and federal governments, and so on. And in the case of Benin, the traditional ruler was exiled, the palace was destroyed, so there was a destruction of a governance system and a very complex system of patronage that was supporting artists and the production of arts and the production of cultural objects. That destruction was not complete so if you go to Benin today, there are still bronze casters that are casting bronze in the traditional way but it damaged very significantly a lot of the infrastructure that traditionally supported artists, artisans, craftsmen, and so on. And the problem is that what came in its place, which is governments that we have today, they have not replaced those systems of patronage. So the arts and culture space in Nigeria has been underinvested massively.
And for me, that's the core of what needs to be restituted. It's a repair of systems that allows the creative sector to flourish. That is the piece, it's the factory that needs to be repaired. It's not the products that the factories were making. So that's one way of thinking about it.
Now that is not to belittle the return of objects, and there are people far better qualified than me who sit within the Royal Court of Benin or who are advisors who can talk about the significance from a religious and cultural side about the objects that were taken. There was an enormous number of objects which have very strong meaning, which have strong histories, that were taken that have enormous value and importance to the people of Edo State, and that should not be underestimated.
So what I don't want to say is that the return of objects is meaningless because obviously, it isn't, it is very meaningful indeed. And I think one of the things that's incredibly important is that if you grew up in Nigeria today, and I look at my life, if I look at the state of let's say the schools that I went to when I was a child, and I compare that to the state of the same schools today, they're worse today than they were in the past.
Across many measures, Nigeria is worse than what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And sometimes when I talk to friends of mine in Nigeria, there's almost a sense of questioning whether there's an inevitability of where we are and are we condemned to be so far behind what our potential actually is. And I think one of the things that the Benin bronzes and artifacts and objects from great periods of African history represent is evidence that we were great. We had real periods of greatness and so therefore we don't deserve, nor should we accept, our current situation. And I think for young people, that is incredibly important. It's incredibly important to have a sense of pride about who you were in the past because that influences greatly your ambitions.
Charlotte Burns: My goodness. That's so moving. That's very moving.
Phillip Ihenacho: It's what all societies recognize, is that you want to have places where you can take people and say, “Look how great we are.” And some of that has to be around your history. Every culture creates a history and a mythology about greatness. The Romans were the best at this. They imported everything from the Greeks and claimed it all as theirs. And then Renaissance Europe did the same thing. And China's good at it as well. You've gotta have places where if there are foreigners who are visiting your country, you take them to, and you can say, “Look how great we are,” and there were periods of greatness that people have forgotten about. And I think that is a combination of objects, but it also a combination, but it also needs to be an infrastructure that is showcasing those objects. You need both. You need places where school children come to and say, “Wow, this is incredible. This is fantastic. This is how we were in the past and this is why I am the way I am today. And this gives me an indication of what I can become. And there is no reason at all for us to accept compromise.”
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: It seems like a lot of the contemporary art scene in West Africa is driven by a sense of community and collectivity. There's a lot of contemporary artists who have residency programs, there's exciting galleries on the ground in Accra and Lagos, for example. Do you feel that sense of collectivity and community?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. Yes, absolutely because this project's not been an easy project. We've had thrown stones thrown at us from several places that we weren't expecting stones to be thrown from us. And it's not easy. It's not easy raising money, it's not easy. Construction is not easy in Nigeria. There's a whole range of things that are not easy. One of the most encouraging things in fact, I would say probably the single most encouraging thing from my perspective is the support that we have received from contemporary creatives, from the successful predominantly diaspora-based artists who have understood what we're trying to do and who are very committed to building platforms for West African-based creatives. If you look at what Kehinde [Wiley] is doing, what a lot of the artists who, Yinka [Shonibare], what they're doing, they're investing in infrastructure, in support systems, for the express purpose of trying to help people who have the talent, but perhaps not the opportunity in Nigeria. Yeah, they’ve been incredibly supportive.
We did an auction of art that was donated to us last year. I was amazed at how supportive artists were, artists that weren't even from West Africa. People in the creative industry know how tough it is for creators generally, and particularly for creatives that are based in West Africa. Creating platforms that showcase their talent, that allow them to interact with the global arts community, is something that they really want to support, and that has made very clear to me, and our team in the interactions we've had with a lot of these artists.
Charlotte Burns: And you have the “Nigeria Imaginary” at the Nigeria Pavilion this year, the second time participating in the Venice Biennale in April.
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. Yeah. That's super exciting. What we wanted to do as a museum is we wanted to emphasize the fact that we are not just about Benin bronzes and that the modern and the contemporary is a core part of what we want to do. And basically when we were recruiting a modern and contemporary curator in the form of Aindrea Emelife, we started talking about initiatives and things that we could do that would demonstrate our commitment to the contemporary. And in terms of government spending priorities, doing something in Venice is not top of the list of priorities as a country. So we said, “Look, we'll organize it, we'll fundraise for it, we'll execute it,” very naively underestimating the level of difficulties but it has been fantastic. So we've raised a significant amount of money, we've got an incredible venue, Aindrea has assembled a great group of artists, and we're all really looking forward to it.
The thing that we decided to do, which is very different I think from a lot of the Venice exhibitions, is it has been deliberately designed as an exhibition that not only will be in Venice but will eventually travel back and be in Nigeria. We want to showcase it in our creative campus so that Nigerians can see what was showcased in Venice. So it becomes not just a temporary exhibition in Venice, but an exhibition that will actually have a homecoming.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, I love that idea.
I know I don't have you for much longer and you've gotta go deal with those builders next door but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the actual campus itself. And then, of course, a couple of ‘what ifs’ to round us out.
So the campus itself is going to be a 20-acre creative campus in the heart of Benin City in the Edo State in Nigeria. There's going to be the 4,300 square meter research and collection center. The rather excitingly titled Rainforest Gallery, which is 1,400 square meter sustainable gallery space set within a lush garden. The Artisans Hall, which is a re-imagining of the 16th century building of the Benin Kingdom, the boutique hotel, the cafe and restaurant, and then studios, performance spaces, public gardens. We talked about the fact that there was a different museum planned at the beginning. David Adjaye was the lead architect on that project. I know you and he have had a long history together. Is he still involved in this project? He's been the subject of various allegations. Is that something you can talk about?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about. So David had three roles. If you go back to 2019, David's firm did the design concept. As I mentioned before, after having discussions with lots of museums and thinking through our own internal strategy, we decided not to proceed with that main museum. We decided instead to focus on a series of buildings and those buildings are being built by several different architectural firms. So we wanted African architects in general, as much as possible, to be involved. So we have the Rainforest Gallery is being designed by a Senegalese architectural firm, the boutique hotel, an Nigerian architectural firm. David's firm was responsible for the research and collections building that is under construction now.
So we have been fortunate in one sense in that the building was already under construction when allegations came out. So we weren't in a situation where you are trying to fundraise, the building's already under construction. That building is a collaboration between David and a Nigerian architectural practice. And the Nigerian architectural practice are the ones doing the construction supervision work.
The third area that David has been involved is in the master plan for the whole area.
That work is essentially complete. We want it to be somewhat organic in terms of development so we want to do a little bit and then see how it goes. The next piece that we are really focused on, the research and collections building which we're calling the Institute that will be finished in November, is the Rainforest Gallery. So we already have a nursery established on site. We have indigenous plants from a forest that is actually only about an hour drive from outside of Benin City—so a lot of Benin was a rainforest. If you look at Benin art, you'll see motifs of leopards and mud fish and pythons and Benin was deeply connected with nature. One of the things we wanted to do was to see if we could bring some of that environment into the heart of our little district so that people have a sense as to what influenced people when they were creating objects in the 16th century. So that building is designed by very talented Senegalese architect. That's one of our core focuses in the next, over the next few months.
We have deliberately not made comments about David or allegations around David and so on. At the end of the day, what we know about it is essentially the same as what everybody else knows about it is what's in the newspaper. We are not in a position to say much about the facts of it. We don't condone allegations like that but we are not the judge and the jury on things that we don't have a lot of information about.
Charlotte Burns: Okay, so moving on. Some of the people that have helped support the project are other museums. You've singled out the German government, you've said have shown considerable courage. You haven't necessarily received objects back from the British Museum, but you partner with the British Museum and the institution actually, David Adjaye, in one of his interviews with the New York Times in 2020 said that the institution was helping excavate old walls as part of a $4 million archeology project. So that's interesting to be working with those institutions. Can you talk a bit more about those relationships, who's showing courage, you know who you wanna single out?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I think, how should I say? For me, one of the key things in order to make something successful in Africa, there's an element of pragmatism that you always have to have. I knew bringing this project—partly because of my experience with building a power plant—is that if you are going to do construction in a historic part of Benin, whether you like it or not, you have an archeological project ab initio, and if you don't organize around it, you are gonna have serious problems. So the last few years, the main activity we've had across the site has been archeological. We didn't want to be in a situation where we are destroying things as we're trying to construct something new and also what we have been hoping, which is the case, is that if we are able to find things, we might be able to incorporate some of what we find into the design of what we're doing so that there is a real sense of history in place.
So in order to do that, we obviously needed funding. We had very early on discussions with the British Museum. We joined the British Museum to apply for funding for this archeological project and we were successful. And that is the project that has been ongoing for the last few years. We have a good relationship with the British Museum.
Obviously British Museum has its constraints about the return of objects but we are not the agitator for the return of objects. I would say we are the facilitator for the return of objects. So we want, there are some people who are concerned about how objects might be looked after when they're returned. We want to demonstrate that there are places that are capable of looking after precious objects. The archeological project has been supplemented with a team that we've worked with from the German Archeological Institute as well. So we've got the Germans and the British working side by side—which is always interesting—and we've managed to build an archeological team of our own. So what we wanted to do in, within the first building this research and collections building, there will be a materials lab is essentially an archeological lab that allows for a lot of the testing and the research that ordinarily would be done outside of Nigeria to be done in Nigeria. Our ambition is to have a center for archeological studies within this first building. And there's obviously huge overlap between the skillset that you need in the archeological world and the materials lab and in the conservation world. So there's a conservation lab and a materials lab within this, the collections building.
We got very early support from the Germans. The Germans approach this very much from a restitution perspective, but they have been helpful across the board. The first building that we're building, that the German government has provided a reasonably substantial amount of money that has gone into that building but more importantly, I think both with the British Museum and the German government is it has allowed us to be able to talk to more institutions. They are obviously credible organizations that give comfort to other Western institutions that one might be talking to. So we've started to receive funding from some of the American foundations, and we're broadening fundraising to include other institutions.
Charlotte Burns: Do you get support from within West Africa?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yes, we do. The Edo State government has provided some support and that has been absolutely vital to us. Again, from a sort of credibility perspective, we are starting to get some funding from Nigerian individuals and some corporates. My own belief is it's much easier to raise money when you've got tangible stuff on the ground that you can show people, so what I'm really hoping is once we've opened this first building, we should be able to raise more funding domestically.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: The late curator Okwui Enwezor said, “The future belongs to Africa because it seems to have happened everywhere else.” So what if that's true? What does that look like?
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I think in many ways we are living in a very exciting time. I look around and as a Nigerian who has spent a lot of time outside of Nigeria, what has recently changed is, before when people ask where you are from, you say you're from Nigeria, there's always a sort of a look of mild suspicion, and sort of Nigeria, I dunno, 20 years ago was all about corruption and fraud. And there was these terrible letters that used to go, I think they probably still do, but, “Give me your bank details and I'll send you lots of money stuff.” And what is interesting for me now is that you say you're from Nigeria and people start talking about music, about art, arts and culture, a lot of people talk about the fact that they would love to visit Nigeria. That was just unheard of before.
We live in this world where West African culture is starting to become the future and I think what we need to do, I'm trying to think how to say it, we need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it because this moment, I think is an incredibly important moment. And that means that we need really to work together in Nigeria and in West Africa—because it's not just a Nigerian thing, it's a West African thing, it's an African thing actually—and capitalize on an opportunity where the world is actually starting to look at us in a different light and to recognize talent and creativity, whether it's fashion or film or music or art. And that is about starting to create institutions that build the link between Africa and the West. Support the creatives. I think Okwui is right, there's an incredible future ahead for African creativity in particular and we need to grab it with both hands.
Charlotte Burns: Phillip, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that motivates you to get up in the morning?
Phillip Ihenacho: Well, I guess the thing that, the thing that motivates me is that when you are working for something that you really believe in, it's not work. It's, yeah, it's a privilege you feel every day. I wake up and I think how lucky I am. Yeah, how lucky I am to be involved in this project that is, yeah, it's a huge privilege. So that is the sort of positive energy, is you wake up and you think, okay, I've got all these interesting things that I could do. Organizing the Nigerian Pavilion at Venice, like that's a dream. So that, that's the carrot.
The stick, the thing that worries me, that is the money. The arts and culture space requires a lot of capital and, yeah, and I know that our journey requires attracting reasonably significant amounts of money from sources that, some of which I've yet to even talk to, so you are in a journey where you know that what you're doing is not fully in your control. You need the support of others. You need to maintain that support and trust of others and you need to be able to do that on a consistent basis. And that's a huge motivator. I wake up every day and I worry about money for this project.
Charlotte Burns: What if you knew what you were getting into when someone asked you if you could help with this project?
[Laughter]
Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. My God, I'm not sure. If I'm very honest with you, I imagined it taking up 20% of my time. I still have some business interests that I'm involved with and then in addition to that, I have a very strong interest in nature conservation work—I plan to spend a lot more time in that space than I have the last couple of years. So I thought, okay, this will be 20% of my time. We will get a little team together and then raise some money and then be off to the races. It is really taking up 90% of my time. It's overwhelmed everything else and honestly, if somebody had asked me we'd like you to spend 90% of your time on a new museum in Nigeria, I would've probably said, no, I can't do that.
What I keep thinking to myself is, okay, I'm gonna get to a point where I can extract myself from this. There are people far better qualified than me who will take over and then I will fade away and that is still my plan. I do intend that, it's just taking a bit longer than I thought and it's a lot more fun than I thought. It has been the most intense experience I've had from a work perspective, I think ever, and I have learned a huge amount in the process so I feel very lucky to, yeah, to be learning, and to be intensively involved in something that is so interesting.
Charlotte Burns: What if people wanted to support you on this journey, Phillip? How would they get involved?
Phillip Ihenacho: It'd be great if people get to get involved financially. We now have got a good team of people. We've got good infrastructure in terms of comms. I think for us, building supporters outside of Nigeria as well as within is extremely important. We're still discovering the way forward. We are still interested in talking to people who have ideas. I think one of the most important things is to remain very flexible, and to approach things in a non-traditional way. And that means really being open-minded about how you do things. We're interested in talking to people who have ideas about what we're doing, and we're also interested in talking to people or institutions that want long-term partnerships. I think we will be a success if we can form good partnerships, both within Nigeria and abroad. That's core to what we're trying to do.
Charlotte Burns: Phillip, thank you so much. I'm so glad we made this work. I appreciate the time.
Phillip Ihenacho: No problem.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you to Phillip Ihenacho, what a great interview.
Next time we’ll be talking to the legendary, peerless art dealer Barbara Gladstone.
Barbara Gladstone: I think that everything is in process all the time and what is really interesting is that it’s not over. It’s not even over when the artist dies. It’s not over. Because there’s constantly evaluation and rethinking going on and when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. That’s why it’s important.
Charlotte Burns: Tune in for much, much more next time on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.