Digital Artefacts Series: Concept & Format

From Shrine to Screen: Reimagining Ìbejì Through Analog and Digital Lenses

In a black-and-white photograph from the 1970s (fig. 1), a young girl stands before a cracked mud wall, clutching a framed image that seems to speak beyond words. The light falls softly across her face, illuminating both her stillness and the quiet intensity of what she holds. The girl, Taiwo, is actually holding the photograph depicting herself beside her deceased twin sister. The sister did not live to take the picture when they were still babies, but the photographer was able to transform imagination into reality by printing Taiwo’s image twice, side by side, within a single frame. What the camera captures and the darkroom reproduces is not simply likeness but longing made visible—a visual invocation of return. Within the frame, two toddlers sit side by side, identical in posture and dress, summoned into being through the darkroom’s alchemy of double exposure.

Here, the photograph becomes more than representation: it is a vessel of memory, a surrogate body standing in for the lost twin. The image performs the ritual labor once carried by the carved ìbejì her mother would have cherished, transforming silver salts and pigment into a spiritual medium. In this quiet act of holding, the boundaries between presence and absence blur. One twin is gone, yet through this image—tinted by grief, devotion, and the faint shimmer of hand-applied color—her spirit endures, luminous within the photograph’s fragile surface.

In Yorùbá cosmology, where twins (ìbejì)² are regarded as sacred, such portraits exceed mere commemoration. They function as ritual technologies,visual acts of spiritual equilibrium, mourning, and metaphysical repair. In that moment, the darkroom becomes a shrine; the photograph, a surrogate body. Before photography, the Yorùbá carved wooden figures (ère ìbejì) to represent departed twins, embodying presence through stylized form (fig.2). These sculptural surrogates served as tactile conduits between the living and the spirit world, each polished and adorned as if alive.

Fast forward to 2018: a new image materializes—sharp, hyperreal, and unmistakably digital. Created by Bénédicte Kurzen and Sanne De Wilde³, their collaborative series on Yorùbá twins revisits this visual and spiritual terrain through the lens of contemporary technology. In this photograph (fig. 3), a young girl meets the viewer’s gaze, her likeness mirrored and doubled through software. The symmetry is deliberate—an homage to twinship, rendered not in the darkroom but on the digital screen. Photoshop replaces the enlarger; code performs the ritual labor.

From hand-carved ère ìbejì to analog portraiture to digital manipulation, the act of duplication no longer merely restores presence—it extends it, transforming remembrance into possibility and ritual into a new form of technological devotion.

Through such digital reanimations, the dialogue between ritual and reproduction extends beyond the material to the virtual. Artists continue to navigate this liminal space, where ancestral cosmologies encounter algorithmic systems and the act of remembrance becomes a gesture of creative resistance. These works trace a continuum of visual thought that resists erasure by adapting across media. Memory, in this context, is not an archive of the past but a living process—reconfigured, remixed, and projected into the digital future.

Notes

1. Sprague, Stephen. “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” African Arts 12, no. 1 (1978): 253.
2. For further discussion of Twins Images in Yoruba traditions, see George Chemeche, John Pemberton, and John Picton, Ìbejì: The Cult of Yoruba Twins. Hic Sunt Leones II. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2003.
3. Bénédicte Kurzen (b. 1980) and Sanne De Wilde (b. 1987) are award-winning photographers whose collaborative projects, including Land of Ìbejì, merge documentary and conceptual practices to explore cross-cultural mythologies, identity, and perception through experimental and visually poetic storytelling.