University of Wolverhampton Public Lecture: Documenting Vodoun in Benin, West Africa

Benin is a country in West Africa nestled between Nigeria to the East and Togo to the West with Burkina Faso and Niger to the North. It was previously the Kingdom of Dahomey, and is often referred to ‘the cradle of voodoo’. Dr Louise Fenton has spent years building relationships with the people and communities of Benin to document and research their culture and history, focussing primarily on Vodoun. This lecture will explore some of the work that Dr Fenton has completed while documenting Vodoun in Benin through her photographs, film and drawings of ceremonies, altars and temples. Her work has focussed on the cultural heritage, the material and visual culture of Vodoun as well as the history of Benin and these traditions. There are many aspects that are endangered, languages, archives and material knowledge and this forms the basis of the research that Dr Fenton is currently undertaking. This is a fully illustrated lecture.

Bio

Dr Louise Fenton is an artist, historian, curator, and writer. Following her BA in Illustration and MA in Art and Design from the University of Wolverhampton she then went on to complete a PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies and History at the University of Warwick, the title of which was ‘Representations of Voodoo: the history and influence of Haitian Vodou on cultural production in Britain and America since 1850’. She is currently a senior lecturer in Contextual Studies in the School of Creative Industries at the University of Wolverhampton. Recent research has been focussed on the visual and material culture of Vodoun in Benin, documenting the ceremonies and altars and researching archives and museums. She has appeared as a panellist on BBC Radio 4 ‘Beyond Belief’, as a consultant on BBC Three for ‘Domino Day’ and writes regularly for the journal Enquiring Eye. She will be curating exhibitions later this year for the Viktor Wynd Museum in London and of her own work at the University.

Public Lecture: Documenting Vodoun in Benin, West Africa