Vernacular Art-space Laboratory, Lagos (VAL Lagos)
Vernacular Art-space Laboratory, Lagos (VAL Lagos) is a community-based, socially engaged art platform founded by Aderemi Adegbite in 2015. It operates within the Iwaya/Makoko waterfront communities in the Yaba, pre-urban axis of mainland Lagos as a long-term curatorial infrastructure for artistic research, public engagement, and collaborative production.
VAL Lagos emerges from a sustained commitment to socially embedded artistic practice that positions the city—particularly its informal and waterfront ecologies—as both site and methodology. Rather than functioning as a conventional institution, it operates as a distributed laboratory where artistic production is inseparable from everyday life, civic negotiation, and local knowledge systems.
The platform is structured around the notion that contemporary art gains critical depth when it is produced in direct relation to lived environments. In this context, VAL Lagos facilitates collaborative interventions between artists and community members, enabling shared authorship, situated storytelling, and experimental forms of public pedagogy.
Context and Methodology
Operating within the socio-spatial realities of Iwaya/Makoko, VAL Lagos engages informal infrastructures, water-based geographies, and transitional urban conditions as primary materials for artistic inquiry. The platform prioritises process-based methodologies including participatory workshops, site-specific interventions, oral history gathering, performative encounters, and temporary spatial activations. Its practice is grounded in three interconnected principles:
-
Situated knowledge production through community embeddedness
-
Relational authorship through collaboration and co-creation
-
Spatial experimentation through non-institutional exhibition contexts
Iwaya Community Art Festival / Biennial (ICAF Lagos)
The Iwaya Community Art Festival (ICAF Lagos) is the flagship programme of VAL Lagos, initiated in 2016 under the artistic direction of Aderemi Adegbite.
ICAF is an international, community-based festival designed as a direct intervention into the exclusivity of mainstream art systems. It relocates artistic production from institutional spaces into the lived environments of Iwaya—streets, waterfronts, informal structures, markets, and abandoned buildings—transforming the community into an active curatorial field.
Since inception, the festival has hosted:
-
Over 15 international artists (Portugal, Ireland, Kenya, Mali, Republic of Benin, Ghana, Netherlands, USA, Italy, Spain)
-
More than 40 Nigerian artists
-
Multiple site-responsive collaborative projects developed with residents
Each edition is structured around a thematic inquiry addressing urgent social conditions. The 2017 edition, for example, focused on migration, displacement, and belonging, linking local waterfront realities to global mobility crises.
ICAF includes:
-
Site-specific installations
-
Community-led performances
-
Public workshops and dialogues
-
Participatory exhibitions
-
Artist-in-Residence programme
The residency component embeds visiting artists within the community, enabling long-term engagement and co-produced outcomes rooted in lived experience.
Over time, ICAF has evolved into the Iwaya Community Art Biennial (ICAB), extending its temporal framework while maintaining its commitment to grassroots cultural production and socially engaged practice.
Communal Re-Imagination
This programme functions as VAL Lagos’s research and epistemic arm. It is dedicated to collective memory, oral history, and speculative urban thinking. Through participatory workshops, storytelling sessions, and mapping exercises, it activates community knowledge as a legitimate curatorial and archival resource.
It foregrounds informal histories and embodied narratives as tools for reinterpreting urban space and generating alternative imaginaries of belonging, identity, and civic life.