“If you can make other people shine around you, you’re actually doing the world a service because we all need to be seen and heard. And anywhere we are, we can be homes for one another, as long as we move through the heart.” -VILLAGER
In our conversation, VILLAGER offered something different: presence. Born AbdulRasheed Adekunle Adaranijo in Lagos, Nigeria, and now rooted in Baltimore, the artist and cultural producer creates work that channels ritual, performance, and resistance. Drawing from their Yoruba lineage and lived experiences, their craft isn’t about self-expression in the individualistic sense, but about channeling something older, deeper, and collectively held. A vessel of the right-minded, as their name suggests, VILLAGER treats community not as a backdrop to their work but as its very essence.
This year, VILLAGER chose to focus their attention and craft on performance-based experiences. “Beginning of this year or last year, I was like ‘performance is gonna be so important because the world is changing,’” they said. In identifying that personal need, VILLAGER produced (MASTER)MIND, a performance-based gathering to bring together artists across disciplines—movement, sound, spoken word—who, like them, are experiencing renewal, rebirth, and transformation. “We really have to be responsible for our own healing, for our own transformation, for our own collective enlightenment. This is just another space amongst many that can do that.”
Whether through performance or art rituals, VILLAGER’s presence and spirit brings us all into moments of collective return: to nature, to self, to one another. Reflecting upon their responsibility as a human being and artist, VILLAGER asks themselves: “What is my responsibility to the collective?”
What follows are excerpts from a dialogue that unfolded like a ceremony—one that reminds us that sanctuary isn’t just something we build, but something we can become for one another if we move through the heart.
WE ARE THE ALTAR
“How much are you dedicated to your own liberation, your own freedom, your own expression, your own release?
Your own surrender will reflect in what you do.”
“We can feel at home in this collective consciousness that we share. And when I say that ‘we are the altar,’ we can also create physical altar spaces where we surrender to something that is much greater and grander than us, which is our collective humanity.”
Like a phoenix, I will rise again and again,
each time gloriously,
each time powerful,
each time gracefully.
Like a phoenix, I will rise with grace and fury.
I am the throne with which time sits on the cross that my fears would die on.
I am the throne with which I will rise upon again and again.
I am minutes, months, years yearning to be anew.
I am transformation itself.
I am change.
Like a phoenix, I will rise again and again.
VILLAGER (b. Abdul Rasheed Adekunle Adaranijo in Lagos, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-born International Artist, Cultural Producer, and African Spirituality Practicioner whose work exists to scrutinize, deconstruct, and redefine what it means to be a “Contemporary African." Through varied mediums such as painting, sculpture, print-making, photography, site-specific and public installation, audio-visual interactive media, performance art, curation, and cultural facilitation, VILLAGER's work echoes a spiritual, anthropological, and research-oriented reexamination of consciousness, existence, and divine energetic potential grounded in the remembrance of Indigenous Yorùbá and broader African knowledge systems, cultural and spiritual practices, philosophies, and traditions.
VILLAGER's work has been featured in publications such as BmoreART, Baltimore Banner, and NUNAR, and has received several awards including the Baltimore Mayor's Office Individual Artist Award (2025). VILLAGER's artwork can be found in private art collections in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Rio de Janeiro.