The ‘Unmasking Scene’ in the Student Films of Shofela Coker

Nigerian-born artist and illustrator Shofela Coker’s student films Oni Ise Owo (2007) and Iwa (2009) narrate tales of redemption at the intersection of divine will and the exercise of human agency. Iwa is a remake of the earlier animation completed as a Motion Graphics final project when Coker was an art student at the Memphis College of Art. This post reads a critical scene in both films to explore artistic creative agency at the intersection of traditional African art production and the digital provenance of animation. Drawing on African art history, and reading cultural symbolisms that drive the animated narratives, this post demonstrates that the aesthetic and sociological universe that Coker assembles in the animations resituates the Yoruba mythopoetic formations that the stories portray.

Reenacting a Yoruba creation myth, the stories follow the same exiled artisans who incur the wrath of the gods for removing their identity masks. A prominent motif in African art, the mask symbolizes invisibility as empowerment, but it may undermine the agency of its wearer, leaving open the tension between carrying an imposed identity and a search for self-actualisation. The consequential sequence in both films where the artisans remove the imposed self is what I call the unmasking scene (Fig. 1). The agentive act, however, leads to a major fallout with the gods who consequently send the tragic heroes into the abyss.

Coker’s animations illustrate this moment of cosmic rejection: at the beginning of both films, he depicts the falling men floundering in a disorienting void. The visuals are accompanied by ominous soundtracks, just as the visceral anguish is pronounced by the horns that blight their heads. Iwa translates to “character,” but it can be understood philosophically in the context of the Yoruba saying ìwà l’ẹwà (beauty is virtue). In this connection, the horns that grow out of the heads of the artisans represent a disfiguration of their beauty. These characters occupy the liminal space marking the transitory point between man and deities. Banished from the city of the gods, both oní iṣẹ́ ọwọ́ (or “artisans") now guard grooves of trees on earth to work out their redemption, and by extension bridge what Wole Soyinka calls the “essential gulf” that separates the gods and men (Soyinka 1976, 144) (Fig. 2).

**Fig. 2 - Screenshot of artisan floundering in the liminal void. *Iwa,* YouTube.**

Both animations share the same plot, yet their stylistic renderings diverge. In her article on photographic practices in African animations, Paula Callus distinguishes between Oni Ise Owo's "two-tone illustrative design” and Iwa’s “3D, sculptural, virtual polygon-forms” (Callus 2015, 61). Oni Ise Owo, a 3-minute short, adopts a 2D style. It’s “two-tone illustrative design” divides the narrative into two segments. A dominant black-and-white tone conveys the dark and visceral atmosphere of the banishment and exile in the first half of the film. In the second, a warmer colour palette emerges, symbolising the artisan’s hopeful journey toward redemption in the sacred groves. Spanning 8 minutes, on the other hand, geometric shapes and patterns characterize the designs in Iwa and announce the different aesthetic influences on the work. In this 3D animation, Coker creates rough models in 3ds Max before exporting them to Zbrush where he adds details. His use of Zbrush links the traditional mode of sculpture making with the virtual mode of digital sculpting and modeling.

In Iwa, Coker animates his sculpture-like characters, imbuing them with life and motion, abilities that hitherto existed in the abstract contexts of Yoruba mythopoetic and animistic formations. In Yoruba art history, sculptural figures can be recognisably human, but not too much. Robert Farris Thompson’s notion of “midpoint mimesis” summarizes this tendency of Yoruba artworks to exist “between absolute abstraction and absolute likeness” (2006, 249). Coker’s characters show aesthetic compliance with Yoruba traditional aesthetic values: his digitally sculpted humans are youthful, taut, and sometimes have shiny bodies with proportional figurative form. For the most part, they retain paused lips and expressionless demeanor. Such aesthetic value that denies the artwork any chance of emotional expression vanishes in the realm of the digital, especially within the expressive provenance of animation.

**Fig. 3 - A minaret structure appears behind the artisan. *Iwa*, YouTube.**

According to Lizelle Bisschoff, “digital technologies facilitate a new kind of relationship between place and space: through their capacity to transgress borders and subvert territories, these technologies are implicated in a complex interplay of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation” (2004, 263). For Bisschoff, artistic productions emerging from the deterritorialised space are “profoundly local” while the processes that go into digital creation and manipulation “open this art up to truly global, transnational encounters” (2004, 263). As African art forms transition from and between traditional provenances and virtual contexts, visual narratives take on new life with limitless possibilities. Pulling from diverse artistic traditions and influences, Coker announces himself as an artist with a global reach so that as his art deterritorialises Yoruba traditional art, it reterritorialises the same within a global cultural landscape and on a broader stylistic canvas. Coker’s animation reflects his own belief in the shifting geography of artistic creation, and in an interview with Paula Callus he noted that “I believe all my work has always been drawn from several influences and practices so I feel hybridity is not a recent development in my work. Because of the proliferation of practices and communication on the internet, it’s hard to determine physical geography as a determining factor in my practice as an artist” (cited in Freddy 2015). The stylistic and media hybridity that marks Coker’s filmography frames his animations as products of encounters and influences. Consequently, the moving digital sculpture reflects Yoruba art only to the extent that Yoruba mythologies provide the narrational content, but the images that emerge are iconographic ensembles of multivalent cultural voices and artistic influences (Fig. 3).

The spatial configuration of the animations challenges our expectations of the settings of a Yoruba tale. With a narrative vocabulary that transcends the confines of Yoruba mythopoetic tradition, Coker fuses visual and sonic idioms from diverse African contexts. In Oni Ise Owo and Iwa, minaret-inspired architectural structures synonymous with designs in West African Sahel, juxtaposed with characters during the unmasking scenes, contrasts with the thatched roofing and impluvium aesthetics emblematic of Yoruba traditional architectural forms. The vernacular architecture in the background pays homage to the art and sounds of great African civilisations. The minaret forms of the buildings and their geometric structures and patterning alienate the Yoruba moving sculpture in these frames. The interiors of the buildings contain geometric shapes and reflect the blend of the modern and traditional architectural language found in the works of Mexican architect Luis Barragán.

The range of Coker’s artistic homage is spatial as it is aural. Sound conveys the sombre mood in Oni Ise Owo. Throughout the short, we are immersed in the aural landscape of the 2003 track "Assoul" by the Tuareg band Tinariwen. Assoul means “traveler” in Tamashek, a fitting sonic companion for the exiled artisan—a nomad journeying toward redemption. The music is an overlay of trumpets and guttural hums. In Iwa, an eerie sound accompanies the imagery of the floundering artisan who is repeatedly jolted by dramatic sounds, driving further his fall from grace.

This blog post has contextualized the art historical elements of Coker’s artistic expressions in order to suggest that at the core of his formal composition, characterization, and narrative logic is a reterritorialized African (Yoruba) mythopoetic aesthetic. It demonstrates how traditional art principles continue to shape aesthetic choices and practices in contemporary African arts, even as those aesthetic ideals are themselves being transformed in the digital context of animation. Coker's keyframes are an assemblage of histories and cultures, architectural and sonic aesthetics, and his auteur signature. Through these films, he demonstrates a commitment to a unique illustrative visual style that combines illustration with digital designs and animation. Perhaps an important connection left to be made relates to how the affective desire of the artisans from the unmasking scene in Oni Ise Owo and Iwa—to break free from an imposed identity—is a metaphor for the ontological desire of African animations to reach self-actualisation and be recognized on their own terms and brought out of the shadow of global marginality.

**Article published: April 26, 2024**

References

Bisschoff, Lizelle. 2017. “The Future is Digital: An Introduction to African Digital Arts.” Critical African Studies 9, no. 3: 261-267.

Callus, Paula. 2015. “Animation, Fabrication, Photography: Reflections Upon the Intersecting Practices of Sub-Saharan Artists Within the Moving Image.” African Arts 48, no. 3: 58-69.

Freddy, Batsirai. 2015. “A Study of an ‘African Aesthetic’ in Character Designs for Animation Through an Analysis of the Work by Kenneth Shofela Coker.” A Master of Arts Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, Farris Robert. 2006. “Yoruba Artistic Criticism.” The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Edited by Howard Morphy, and Morgan Perkins, 242-269. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Biography

Michael Oshindoro is a Ph.D. candidate in African Cultural Studies with a doctoral minor in Visual Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on critical cultural analysis of visual forms and practices, like animation, comics, and VFX, as crucial social texts with which we can rethink what it means to be African in the 21st century. Michael’s research is based in Nigeria, where he conducts archival research and ethnographic studies in animation studios.