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Eshu, the Yoruba Trickster

Dandara Maia is a researcher and curator pursuing a PhD in African studies at the University of Bayreuth. At the Museum of Modern African Art, Iwalewahaus, she was part of the curatorial team of three exhibitions dedicated to African textiles, WAXATLAS, NOT YET, and FLOATING ASSEMBLIES. Her scholarly pursuits encompass diverse areas, including fashion in Africa, African textiles, material culture, and the political utilization of fashion within the Black diaspora. Her current research focuses on mapping sensuous experiences associated with ankara fabrics in Nigeria and Brazil. The Ph.D. dissertation delves into the image agency of these prints from a decolonial perspective based on the Yoruba concept of ashe.
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This platform is a work in process of the curatorial research project Eshu, the Yoruba Trickster, developed in the context of the Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral in Germany. 
The call for the 2025 Artist Residency invited applicants to propose projects under the theme “Trickers, United!” As a researcher deeply immersed in Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, my first and only possibility of response to this call was to talk about Eshu. 

Eshu could have killed a bird yesterday with a stone he threw today!

Eshu is the Orisha (Yoruba deity) who holds the ashe, the vital energy. With his trickery, Eshu took much of the powers distributed by Orunmilá (the guardian of Ifá) and became the guardian of the ashe. He is movement itself, traversing the realms and enabling creativity and production. The “cultural hero” creates order through disorder, enforcing the proper offering of sacrifices to prevent the world from falling apart. Therefore, Eshu’s mischievous affairs teach lessons to those who fail him. 
Figurated by colonialism as the devil due to the Christian dichotomies of good and evil,  Eshu crossed the Atlantic during the slave trade to become a creative force in the Black diaspora.  Eshu embodies the histories, the resistances, and the imaginations of ancestry in the artworks to challenge racist hierarchies and carve out possibilities for emancipation in the Afro-diaspora.   
This curatorial project engages with these artistic exercises on  Eshu.  By connecting with the artistic Eshu world-making, the curatorial project aims to illuminate the contemporary resonances with the Yoruba trickster. The project seeks to reclaim Eshu from colonial misrepresentation and present him as a potent symbol of cultural resilience and emancipatory potential. In doing so, we aspire to manifest and conceptualize the Yoruba philosophy of  Eshu and the crossroads and its Atlantic translations as a plastic, poetic, and mythical force of communion and (re)creation. The curatorial project celebrates the richness of African heritage and fosters an understanding of the enduring legacy of  Eshu.

Through research on the divinity, his many manifestations, talks with artists, and reflections on various artworks that touch upon the many faces of this trickster, I aim to assemble a body of works that make justice to this archetypical figure wrongly characterized as an evil spirit.

This platform takes the shape of an ongoing exercise. Here, I take the liberty to think, correct, improve, and take as many directions as the crossroads may allow. Visitors are welcome to flaneure through the texts, photographs, videos, and sounds I may (or may not) post here. I welcome anyone to respond to these productions by sending any (respectful) reactions through the contact form.  
With the blessings of  Eshu, we may transform this digital interactive experience into a catalog or physical exhibition. 
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