October 23, 1963, Calabar, Nigeria – March 15, 2019, Munich, Germany
Ten Kilometers
Queridísimo Okwui,
What is memory? Why does one remember? How does one remember? Where do we keep hundreds, thousands of memories in our brain? When does memory become history?
It feels strange to write you a tribute. How does one honor someone whose life was a tribute, a gift to me, and to so many artists around the world? A life dedicated to art and culture? A life spent insisting, asserting, demanding, that we, artists and intellectuals, create models of thinking the world?
Of all the memories I have of you and us, it is the following reminiscence that came first to my mind:
It was September 1998. We were in San Sebastian, in the Basque Country.…