Shrine Architecture meets Science Fiction.

……Riddle.
“My sculptures are houses,
my gates are trees,
my walls are forests,
my shrines are sculptures.”

- Adunni (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.94)

Suzanne Wenger is an Austrian by birth. Better known as Adunni to those familiar with her history at Oshogbo, her role in the becoming of Oshogbo as a prime tourist site is of such major significance due to the level of her involvement in the art, culture, traditions and religion of the people, definitely beyond the level of mere interaction. Upon the recent celebrations of her ninetieth birthday, (which was perhaps crowned by the adoption of the Osun groves as a world heritage site by UNESCO), her phenomenal work on the sacred groves demand and deserve deeper explorations.

The younger Suzanne Wenger was every inch a modern European artist though even then her strong will was wont to make her deviate often enough from the bare norms of the creative environment she existed in, which was often in conflict with the workings of her inner spirit. With an early life that saw Suzanne surviving the Nazi excesses in Vienna and subsequently exhibiting her works in Vienna and Paris; fate would later see her heading for Nigeria in the company of Ulli Beier (when he came to take up his university job) with no pre - planned notions of her future roles. Soon enough, her interactive forays into the lives of the people amongst whom she lived saw her absorption into the religion not just as an adherent but even as a priestess of Obatala, perhaps culminating in her work for the preservation of the Osun sacred groves. The danger lay (and still lies) with the encroachment of hunters, farmers, loggers and property developers into an area that was vital not just for the spiritual activity but also for the culture and tradition it harboured.




Adunni’s work entailed the delineation of the site of the grove and the restoration of crumbling shrines and altars, an exercise which presented new platforms for Adunni and her workmen to explore their artistic selves in sculptures of organic form and relief murals. Adunni approached her shrine architecture as “an invocation of a future for the gods” deriving beauty from the decay and collapse of ancient clay buildings (Brockmann & Hotter: ‘Adunni, A portrait of Sussane Wenger’, Machart, Germany, 1994). However, Adunni claims her work is not Yoruba art since she has never deviated from her European origins. Her belief in syncretism might account for this paradox, for Adunni sees the same human basis behind all cultures across their different dimensions. Thus the ancient Yoruba, Tibetians or aboriginal American Indians have common baselines of spirituality spread out through time.






But how does Adunni’s architecture engage with modern architecture? She refers to the order in disorder from a non scientific, albeit an animist’s view point when she says: “If you sit in this Oshun forest, you know this forest exists through its multiple forms, through its immense variety - an unorganised beauty where every detail is tremendously strong”.
- (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.34)

This perspective gains currency though when appraised through the prism of modern science as represented in this contribution by Feigenbaum (one of the pioneers of the new science of chaos theory as recorded by James Gleick in the book ‘Chaos, Making a New Science’ Penguin, 1993) to the discourse:
“One has to look for scaling structures - how do big details relate to little details…. The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.”
Again, applying this perception to art, Feigenbaum comments on the “zillions of details” put into Van Gogh’s early work, the ‘definite interplay between the softer textures and the things with more definite lines” in the Dutch ink drawings of around 1600. He comments on the works of Rusdael and Turner, where “there’s some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that.” Organic forms adopt new meanings when viewed from fresh perspectives. The multi layering of views, perspectives and meanings is what results in the ‘indescribable’ emotional response elicited from the observer.



In essence, organically blended art is not pristine or clinical like the products of the icons of the modern movement in architecture: Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus ideals or Le Corbusier’s ‘machine’ houses. Rather it comes as a product of layers of influences, layers of emotion and application. Having said that, it would be foolhardy to totally reject the ideas which brought about the modern movement and machine aesthetic as propagated by the likes of Gropius and Le Corbusier. Recent history makes plain that fact. Industrialisation and the era of the machine have come to stay. Daily, new methods and new technologies are being discovered, much so that architecture can not keep pace with new developments. That has always been the bane of innovation, a lingering attatchment to the old ways which have been tried and tested while new realities outweigh their means.

In trying to rationalise the chaos of natural disorder in Adunni’s work with the straight line tenets of Euclidean geometry as typified by the modularised construction of machine components, the question arises, how do the structured principles of science meet with the organic philosophy of Yoruba culture and religion as exhibited in Oshogbo art? Are they really divergent philosophies or do they intercept at the frontiers? It should be remembered that industrialisation or mass production is not unique to man. Nature is industrialised. New components and new parts are being mass produced constantly in the continuous process of regeneration. Man mimics nature. Indeed man is part of nature. From the perspective of Yoruba culture, modularisation finds justification in the Ifa corpus. The Odu of 16x16x16 is a classical grid for the repetition of a pattern: a layering of rhythms. However, each odu is unique and the entire mantra is organically blended. How is that for architecture? There is modularisation in the leaf, yet it looks unstructured. Enter the theory of chaos and fractal dimensioning. Disorder is order we can not see. Disorder is beautiful. Suzanne Wenger must have been referring to this reality when she posited that:

“You will notice that we cannot build straight walls any more. If you follow the line of a shrine wall, it is like a man who is excited or moved, a man who wants to express something and whose face is formed by these emotions. The shrines thus become like our own excited features…..What we are doing now is expressionistic architecture.” (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.94)


-Ayodele Arigbabu. (Published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Oct 23-29 2005)