A Haunting is a short experimental film exploring ancestral presence, identity, inheritance and selfhood through the idea of haunting. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting as the persistence of what appears absent, the film considers how ancestral memory, cultural knowledge and inherited histories can continue to shape the present.
The film features my father's voice speaking in Etsako, my mother tongue from the Afemai region of Edo State, Nigeria. For me, hearing a language I recognise but can no longer fully understand creates a tension between intimacy and distance. His voice becomes a carrier of something inherited, while the language itself evokes what has been lost.
The ceramic masks in the film are an extension of my practice into ceramics, and I also perform in the film. I created the masks to think through ideas of identity, ancestry, and the parts of ourselves that are inherited but not always visible. Worn on the body, they become a way of questioning what we reveal, what we conceal, and what might exist beneath or beyond the self we recognise.
The film emerges from my own questioning of ancestry, spirituality and belief, particularly the tension between my Catholic upbringing and my growing engagement with ancestral ways of understanding presence and inheritance. A Haunting embraces uncertainty and asks what it means to feel the presence of something that cannot be fully seen, recovered or explained.
Through image, sound, performance and masks, A Haunting explores how memory, language and ancestry can linger in the present, revealing how what we inherit can remain both intimate and distant.
A Haunting was shot in Aberdeen, Scotland