A short tribute on an archaeologist whose excavations at Ile-Ife proved that West Africa was making its own glass, from its own raw materials, centuries before anyone thought to look, and the film we built from the very thing his research is about.
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola is an archaeologist of early glass production in West Africa. He took his PhD at Rice University and is the lead archaeologist on the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) archaeology project in Benin City, working as a research fellow with the British Museum's Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
His excavations at Igbo-Olokun, a precinct of the ancient Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in south-western Nigeria, recovered more than twelve thousand glass beads alongside glass-encrusted crucibles and production debris. Chemical analysis showed a glass whose composition matched no known import: it was made locally, from local raw materials, between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The Dan David Prize honored Babalola for work that shows highly sophisticated glassmaking developed independently in the region, with a workshop centred in Ile-Ife, overturning the long assumption that sub-Saharan Africa only reworked glass made elsewhere.
When we first heard what Babalola had found, that the beads of Ile-Ife were not imported treasures but objects the city made itself, from earth and fire, in a workshop of its own, we knew almost immediately how the film had to be made. Not drawn. Not rendered. It had to be made of beads. The whole world of the film, the city, the market, the makers, the map, would be built in a stop-motion style, out of the same small glass objects the research is about.
That decision is the film. A history of beadmaking, animated in beads, so that the material carries its own argument before a word is spoken. It was slow, and it changed the register of the film entirely. It is one of the clearest examples of a way of working we return to often: letting the substance a scholar studies become the substance the film is made from.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.
Babalola's film is one of the clearest examples of our material-first practice. If the film is about lipstick, draw it with lipstick →