Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change. She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through numinous immersive experience, experimental sculptural environments, archetypal personae, biophilia, accessibility as innovative creativity, neurophenomenology, alternate sound worlds, speculative fictions and ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic.
Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofabulation, she proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for perceptual change, radical care and transformation of the self and community.
SELECTED WORK & PROJECTS
IMMERSIVE TECH / ACCESSIBLE ART & MUSIC: Fall and then Rise On A Soft Winter's Morning
15 November 2023, Colour Factory London
Presenting a new & exciting event accessible to Deaf, deaf and HoH - Fall and then Rise on a Soft Winter's Morning. The event is by Nwando Ebizie and took place at Colour Factory, Hackney Wick London on Wed 15 November in collaboration with London Sinfonietta. The show is an accessible multi-sensory, orchestral/live art experience which represents music through vibration, British Sign Language (#BSL) translation and movement with Sign.
Watch the full event below
Distorted Constellations Vol 2: A Visual Snow Alternate Reality
Online video, 2021
Distorted Constellations Vol 2: A Visual Snow Alternate Reality (2021) is an exploration of neurodivergency inspired by the artist’s experience living with Visual Snow Syndrome. The music for the video 'Something Like Empathy (Visual Snow)' by Nwando Ebizie is taken from ‘The Swan’. Video produced thanks to FORMA ARTS MEDIA
The project has been initially presented in 2019 as an event and workshop series at Brighton Festival & Push Festival Manchester
Hildegard: Visions
R&D project
Hildegard: Visions is a modular two-day opera and immersive environment inspired by the works and life of Hildegard von Bingen. A multisensory experience of sound, movement, scent and taste, it will combine song, electronic soundscapes and ritual traditions from across cultures and eras.
The piece has grown out of Nwando’s research into the neuroscience of perception with her long-time collaborator, neuroscientist Dr Edward Bracey, and into the connections between atypical perception and creativity
Could a possible neurodiversity lead to seeing the world differently, and to enhanced creativity?
In line with Hildegard’s religious and mystical practices, the piece offers ritual experiences which connect to the ecstasies of religious visions. Inspiration for the piece also flows from the repetitive music of the Downtown minimalists (Reich, La Monte Young), Rzewski’s Coming Together, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Afrodiasporic rituals and dances, hypnotherapy, women’s hamam traditions and more.
A day-long immersive mystery opera. A multisensory numinous experience. This piece is about Hildegard’s life as an experiential constellation viewed from Nwando's particular perspective as a Neurodivergent Afrofabulist. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)‚ Benedictine abbess, composer, visual artist, writer and mystic; not only a visionary, but also, uniquely for the time, a woman whose visions were recorded and preserved in musical scores, writings and illuminated manuscripts‚ lives again in new form.
Through Hildegard: Visions, we find our inner Hildegard and leave with the same curiosity that propelled her forward to discover, connect with, make and savour life to its fullest.
Ordo Virtutum (24 - 29 April, 2023) is a work in progress, part of the larger immersive performance and installation piece entitled Hildegard: Visions.
Extreme Unction Vol. 2
28 June – 1 July, 2023
Extreme Unction Vol. 2 is a transformative space at Toynbee Studios in Aldgate, London where grieving and loss meet ecstasy and exultation, a liminal sonic-ritual art environment inspired by the life and spirit of 12th-century visionary Hildegard von Bingen.
A multisensory experience of intimacy, listening, stillness and communing with inner and outer worlds through sound, touch, taste and sense of the body in space. Drawing community back together again at a time when we have all lost so much. A preparation for viridity. A piece of speculative architecture that functions as sonic installation, instrument and imagined communal bathing space. A neurodivergent and biophilic approach to design. Featuring a sonic journey created by Nwando Ebizie
Nwando Ebizie: The Garden of Circular Paths
21 August 2021 - 27 February 2022
Created in response to Barbara Hepworth and co-commissioned as part of Yorkshire Sculpture International.
The Garden of Circular Paths takes visitors on a sonic art guided journey through the life and work of Hepworth, featuring composed music and field recordings from places in Yorkshire and Cornwall which have a connection to Hepworth’s life.
The installation is designed for headphone listening whilst walking through Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life exhibition, inviting visitors to experience it through Ebizie’s lens as a Yorkshire-dwelling Afrofuturist.
Last to Bloom, First to Fruit (part of group show This is a Forest)
October - November 2023, Moda - Leeds
A speculative fiction mixed media piece, inspired by the proposed Forest site (site #22 Ex Matthew Murray School) situated in an alternative reality.
Building from Nwando's own speculative text: ‘We need to be like the forest’ where she argues that to create a forest, we need to learn from indigenous ‘Lo-tek’ technologies.
In response to This is a Forest, Nwando spent time in the ex-Matthew Murray site, collecting rubbish there, cleaning, arranging, sorting this from that. A ritual of understanding and connecting to that land. From it Nwando created new possibilities. Coated, covered, poured over, coaxed with clay.
MUSIC
Southbank Centre/Queen Elizabeth Hall live show of two new pieces - ‘All The Calm Of A Distant Sea’ and ‘Solve Et Coagula’ - with BBC Concert Orchestra (January 23rd, 2025)
Nwando presended two brand new pieces alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra (arr. Mark Knoop) for BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified Live with presenter Elizabeth Alker and orchestra conductor André de Ridder.
The work showcases a new album project ‘All the Calm of a Distant Sea’, set for release later in 2025, which follows the 2022 release of Ebizie’s highly acclaimed debut 'The Swan’. The second piece, 'Solve et Coagula' is a narrative poem, placing the listener into a three dimensional sound world where they are cast in the role of the heroine, on the heroine’s journey. The performance involves a new choreography, dance and poetry.
BBC RADIO 3 Q&A
"My work deals with ritual. Like most of my pieces (sonic, visual or physical) I begin with the ritual that I want to create – and it is often a ritual that I feel I need within my life at the moment. Lessons I need to learn. Initiations I need to go through. I create a mythopoetic journey – feeling out what this should be and then I convert it into a poetic text."
In 2022 Nwando released her highly-anticipated debut album ‘The Swan’, via Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records, including a special cassette tape release. This genre-breaking album is a work of sonic fiction into the imagined world of a matriarchal community, unfolding like a time-bending ethnographic account of found sound and footage that is at once both ancient and futuristic. The project brings together Nwando’s leftfield electronic experiments, cross-border musical influences, radical live art practices, and interests in Black Atlantic ritual cultures and speculative fiction.
Alongside the long-awaited album release, Nwando has been invited to curate a weekend of Black Fabulation at The Southbank Centre in London as part of the summer season: In The Black Fantastic, on the 22-24 July. The events are an opportunity for participants to experience ‘The Swan’ over three days via a “constellation that makes up my lens of the world”. Nwando will open the gates to ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic, exploring experimental performances, guided visualisations, dance, and live music, before finally resting and resetting.
Ahead of the album, Nwando releases single ‘Myrrha’, which she describes as:
“a lament. A song of sufferance, of metamorphosis. Change is painful, and Transformation is essential.”
Floating along atop the Yanvalou rhythm, with a marching band interceding, Myrrha features samples by Tom Richards made on his analog DIY synths, and saxophones by regular collaborator and the album’s co-producer Hugh Jones aka Crewdson.
'I Seduce' Official Music Video
'The Swan' Official Music Video
PRESS & RADIO
The Swan follows on from the dizzyingly experimental heights of 2021 singles, I Seduce, and The Swan singles, the latter of which was chosen by Gazelle Twin as her ‘favourite song of 2021’ and was featured on BBC Radio 6 Music’s NYE show and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction NYE show.
Tina Edwards featured 'I Seduce' on her 'Universal Sanctuary' show on Worldwide FM
The Wire's weekly show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured 'I Seduce' by Nwando Ebizie.
PRESS QUOTES
PODCAST
For All I Care podcast series
Wellcome Collection and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents a new five-part podcast by Nwando Ebizie reimagining care and healing through the lens of art, health and science. Each 45-minute episode includes conversations, artists’ works and healing experiences. The series explores what care means for our bodies, our families, our communities, the planet and our futures.
CURATION
'Good Boy!' - Liverpool Biennial X British Council online Symposium - 'Aftercare'.
Good Boy!'
Your Reality is Broken at Wellcome Collection
On 1st December 2017, MAS productions presented a Friday Night Spectacular at the Wellcome Collection, London. Curated by Nwando Ebizie and Directed by Jonathan Grieve. A night of visceral performance and conversation, exploring altered states, visual illusions, hallucinations, and how these are linked to the creative act.
Curated by Nwando Ebizie and Jonathan Grieve it featured 50 performers, artists, scientists and cultural commentators.
Perception is fundamental to who we are and how we experience life. But how much can we actually trust our senses? A scientific, philosophical and creative approach to this question will invite you on a journey into your inner and outer experiences of the world.
Music by Nwando Ebizie
DIRECTION
Self, Sense, Space
16 April 2023, Brighter Sound Manchester
Self, Sense, Space was a 4-day creative residency led by formidable interdisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie. The project explored and celebrated access as a creative practice.
Part of our gender equality initiative All Things Equal, the residency brought together a group of D/deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent artists from different disciplines including composers, animators, textile artists and theatre makers.
"Making accessibility part of art isn't a compromise, it's a feature."
COMPOSITION
Aurora Orchestra, Part of ‘Inside Beethoven’
23 March 2023, Printworks London
A co-curation with Aurora Orchestra to create an immersive concert experience featuring Amor Fati - a 70 minute surround sound AV piece utilising film and D&B's soundscape system spread out through Printworks for 3000 people.
Amor Fati is part of a larger research exploring multi sensory ritual experiences, the prioritising of disabled audiences. The piece was created in response to the invitation from Aurora Orchestra to curate an evening that would take an audience further into Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, via Nwando's lens.
Inspired by the idea of ‘Fate knocking’, I connected this to my interest in the Jungian/Nietzschean philosophy of Amor Fati - the love of one’s fate and the ancient Greek Moirari - the Fates. The first three movements are named after each one of the fates and the music is inspired by their archetypal natures.
An experiential site sensitive work, it was developed for the two unique spaces at Printworks, to create an immersive experience, leading the audience into and out of each of the Beethoven movements. Importantly, it was also created to be fully accessible to Deaf audiences - containing a Visual poem projected onto the 12m high screens of Printworks and a lighting sequence to wrap the viewer in analgous visuals. The visual poem was derived from a narrative poem written by the composer and then reworked into a BSL theatrical performance by Deaf performer Chisato Minamimura and composer Nwado Ebizie. They both appear in the film, adding another layer of connection for Deaf and hearing audiences.
Somewhere - film score
The film, Somewhere, is a collaboration between British-Nigerian composer and musician Nwando Ebizie, The Opera North Orchestra, director Juliet Ellis and choreographer Harriet Waghorn, produced by Disruptive Element Films and ENON Films and starring dancer Jahmiah Simpson.
“Somewhere is a response to the relationship between the creative and the spiritual, visualising a dancer moving between the waking world and the dream world” explains director Juliet Ellis. “Her body explores its relationship to freedom and limitation – as her physicality is being pulled and pushed, her fragility, vulnerability and fierce strength are attempting to coexist.”
Broadcasted on Sky Arts on September 26th and 29th, 2024
RADIO HOSTING
On January 20th, 2025 Nwando was one of the guests of BBC Radio 4's 'Start The Week along with the neuroscientist and best-selling author Daniel Levitin and the dance critic Sara Veale.
You can listen back to the radio show via BBC Sounds
AWARDS
Ivor Novello Awards Nominee 2021
Nwando was also nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer award in 2021. Having previously released left-field pop and electronic music under Lady Vendredi (her blaxploitation pop alter-ego), Nwando carves out a bold new Afrofuturist exploration in The Swan, her first album release under her own name Nwando Ebizie. Later this year, Nwando will tour The Swan with a live performance, supported by Battersea Arts Centre, through the Foyle Foundation.
The Oram Awards 2019 Winner
Presented by PRS Foundation and The Radiophonic Institute, The Oram Awards recognise women and gender diverse artists who are innovators in the fields of music, sound and related technologies in honour of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Daphne Oram, and other pioneering women and gender diverse music creators in music and sound.
Nwando Ebizie was the recipient of the Oram Awards in 2019 and has been part of Daphne Oram Trust since then.
MANIFESTO
An approach to ecological collapse that recognises the potential of neurodivergent and indigenous contributions might just be the thing to save us.
Nwando has designed her manifesto by recreating her own thought processes, culminating in the diagram above.
A plain text version of Nwando’s manifesto can be downloaded upon request.