Introduction
Lagos’s experimental arts festival Afropolis returns for its fifth edition from 22 to 30 November 2025. This year’s theme, “Other Worlds,” calls on artists, writers, performers, musicians, filmmakers, and digital creators to reimagine reality by exploring new forms of cultural storytelling, community healing, and speculative design. The event coincides with the launch of The Afropolis journal, a new publication that will serve as a lasting platform for critical essays, poetry, photography, and visual arts emerging from the festival.
Afropolis: A Festival of Movement and Imagination
Since its inception, Afropolis has established itself as a mobile and interdisciplinary platform for creative experimentation. It has hosted past editions in Lagos, Barcelona, Marseille, Lyon, and Noisiel, gathering artists and thinkers from across Africa and the diaspora. The festival offers a space for radical dialogue, performative storytelling, and artistic invention grounded in African knowledge systems.
The 2025 edition returns to Lagos, the city where Afropolis began. Over nine days, urban spaces will transform into arenas of creativity and conversation. The event brings together visual artists, dancers, poets, technologists, philosophers, musicians, and more to engage with this year’s theme.
Festival Theme: Other Worlds
“Other Worlds” invites contributors to imagine and build speculative, poetic, ritualistic, and ecological visions that transcend the limits of current systems. The concept encourages radical engagement with planetary crises, personal memory, ancestral wisdom, and the power of the imagination.
This edition’s curatorial framework is inspired by Yorùbá cosmology and structured around four conceptual pathways: Aiye, Orita, Orun, and Egbe. These pathways serve as lenses for exploration, each one inviting a distinct artistic response rooted in mythology, spirit, community, and movement.
The Four Yorùbá Pathways
Aiye – The Living World
This path focuses on land, memory, and movement. Artists may reflect on the experience of exile, ecological interdependence, ruins, and everyday life in flux. It is a space to explore the physical, historical, and emotional geographies that define “home.”
Works might include:
- Photographic and film documentation of urban spaces
- Installation art exploring environmental decay
- Performance mapping ancestral trails or migration
Orita – The Crossroads
Orita explores moments of transition, intersection, and improvisation. It considers the experiences of travelers, displaced communities, and the thresholds between identities, geographies, or realities.
Possible expressions include:
- Spoken word and oral storytelling
- Movement-based performances symbolizing liminality
- Mixed media pieces that evoke alternate journeys
Orun – The Ancestors
This pathway calls for engagement with spiritual traditions, ancestral stories, and mythological thinking. Orun represents the invisible world, where the living and the ancestral coexist.
Relevant forms may include:
- Ritual performance
- Sound installations invoking ancestral voices
- Narrative films or poems based on traditional divination
Egbe – Kindred Spirits
Egbe evokes imagined futures, children’s perspectives, and unseen communities. It is a speculative zone where solidarity with the unknown becomes possible through technology, imagination, and play.
Artists might contribute:
- Futurist digital art
- Children’s theatre based on speculative cosmology
- Collaborative workshops or collective dreaming practices
Who Should Apply
Afropolis welcomes a wide range of creatives working across disciplines. The festival is particularly interested in works that are:
- Site-specific or community-engaged
- Rooted in African or diasporic epistemologies
- Experimental, hybrid, or genre-defying
- Focused on healing, resistance, or reimagination
Eligible participants include:
- Visual artists, muralists, and installation creators
- Writers, poets, and essayists
- Dancers, choreographers, and performance artists
- Musicians, DJs, sound designers, and composers
- Filmmakers and digital media practitioners
- Coders, designers, and speculative technologists
Submission Information
Submissions should align with at least one of the four curatorial pathways. Each applicant may propose a single work or a series of interconnected pieces. Collaborative submissions are welcome.
Deadline for submissions: 15 August 2025
Selections will be announced in September 2025. Chosen projects will receive support for presentation during the Lagos festival and may be featured in The Afropolis journal.
All proposals must include:
- Artist statement (max. 500 words)
- Description of the work (concept, medium, format)
- Visual or audio documentation (if available)
- Short biography or portfolio
Why Afropolis Matters
Afropolis is more than a festival. It is a gathering of imagination, a celebration of refusal, and a mapping of futures beyond colonial paradigms. By creating space for experimental and transdisciplinary expression, Afropolis nurtures collective healing and cultural renewal.
Lagos, with its layers of contradiction, creativity, and chaos, is the ideal site for this unfolding. It is a city of crossroads between past and future, material and spiritual, known and unknown.
The Afropolis Journal
Launching alongside the 2025 festival, The Afropolis journal will provide a critical and archival outlet for the work generated through the event. The journal will feature:
- Essays, conversations, and curatorial notes
- Poetry and speculative fiction
- Visual narratives, drawings, and photography
- Experiments in typography, sound, and design
This platform extends Afropolis beyond the temporal limits of the festival. It invites long-term engagement with themes that require care, nuance, and radical sensitivity.
A Call to Dreamers, Builders, and Disruptors
Afropolis 2025 is a space for those seeking to challenge the narratives imposed on Africa and its diasporas. It welcomes those who are tired of responding to crisis and wish instead to compose possibility. It calls on artists to shape the worlds they want to live in.
As the festival unfolds in November, Lagos will host not only performances and exhibitions but also workshops, dialogues, and open rituals of collaboration. The city will become a portal to other worlds.
Conclusion
Afropolis 2025 is more than an event it is a cultural catalyst encouraging artists and thinkers to push boundaries, challenge conventions, and reimagine the possible. As the festival invites creators to envision “Other Worlds,” it reminds us that art is not merely reflective but generative. It shapes futures, reclaims narratives, and opens doors to unseen dimensions of African identity and innovation.
For those who wish to explore this year’s theme or submit their work, detailed information is available on the official Afropolis platform:
https://www.afropolis.org/2025
In this pivotal edition, Afropolis urges us to step into the unknown not with fear, but with creativity. Through performance, sound, image, and word, the festival becomes a portal to what Africa can dream radical, plural, and deeply human.
