Victoria-Idongesit Udondian | Kayeyei: Archive embodied

Kayeyei: Archive embodied is a durational performance in which bodies become living repositories of history, labor, and global circulation. Performers continuously layer secondhand garments onto themselves, inspecting, tagging, and wearing each piece as if cataloguing an archive. As the layers accumulate, movement becomes restricted, identities obscured, and the body strained under the weight of material histories embedded in the clothes.

Drawing from the global secondhand clothing trade and its afterlives in places like Kantamanto Market in Accra, the performance foregrounds the invisible labor, migration, and environmental burden carried by these garments. Over time, the archive exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it, collapsing into the surrounding space as garments are shed, forming sculptural residues. The work reflects on the impossibility of fully holding or representing these histories, positioning the body as both carrier and site of breakdown within global systems of circulation

Brief Context:
‘Kayayei’(she who carries the burden) are the women head porters in the market, many of whom have migrated from northern Ghana in search of work in the south. The scale of the secondhand clothing trade bears heavily, literally and figuratively, on their bodies. In Hausa, kaya means load, luggage, or burden, where the word kayayei’is derived from.