Artfrica Institute of History, Art and Contemporary CULTURE
About Dr. Odi Okaka Oquosa
Dr Odi Okaka Oquosa is a scholar, multidisciplinary artist, social scientist, Indigenous knowledge practitioner, community activist, and spiritual teacher whose work bridges African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, decolonial scholarship, and community healing. Drawing from his Igbo-Nigerian heritage and cosmology, his practice explores the relationships between identity, trauma, memory, environment, and belonging.
His work moves fluidly across research, artistic practice, community engagement, and spiritual knowledge systems. Through sculpture, writing, public scholarship, and participatory research, he investigates how historical symbols, landscapes, and institutions shape collective consciousness and social wellbeing.
Dr Oquosa completed his PhD at the University of Sussex with a thesis titled When a Dolphin Is Not a Dolphin. The research presents a multidimensional investigation into the lingering symbolic infrastructures of empire within civic and institutional spaces in Brighton and Hove. The study examines sites such as the Victoria Fountain (the Dolphin Fountain), the Fountain International plaque, the Wave of Compassion memorial, and the heraldic symbolism embedded in the University of Sussex coat of arms.
Through these case studies, the thesis reveals how imperial imagery continues to circulate within contemporary public space, often unnoticed yet deeply influential. Particular attention is given to imperial honours such as the Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG), whose imagery depicts St George standing over a defeated Black figure represented as a dragon. Such imagery reflects what Dr Oquosa describes as the enduring symbolic architecture of empire and its relationship to wellbeing, memory, and belonging.
The research introduces two key conceptual contributions: symbolic harassment and symbolic justice. Symbolic harassment refers to the subtle but persistent ways in which colonial symbols continue to normalise historical hierarchies and silence alternative histories. Symbolic justice, by contrast, explores how these same symbols can be critically reinterpreted and transformed into spaces of dialogue, healing, and historical reckoning.
At the centre of this work is Dr Oquosa’s methodological framework, the EtuPath Six Sense Continuum of Collective Self. Developed through more than two decades of community practice, artistic exploration, and research, the framework provides a culturally grounded approach to understanding how individuals and communities perceive, absorb, interpret, and transform symbolic environments.
The EtuPath continuum moves through the stages of Receptor, Absorber, Condenser, Transformer, Transmitter, Transmutation, and Continuum, offering a dynamic model for analysing affect, silence, memory, and embodied responses to historical symbols. Within participatory research contexts, the framework enables the capture of subtle emotional and cognitive responses that conventional methodologies often overlook.
In dialogue with critical heritage studies, postcolonial theory, and the concept of the “implicated subject” articulated by Michael Rothberg (2019), Dr Oquosa’s research examines how societies inherit and reproduce historical narratives. His work interrogates what he describes as the “Triple Lock System” of empire — the interlocking structures of religion, education, and economic power that historically stabilised colonial authority and continue to shape institutional memory.
Beyond academia, Dr Oquosa’s work is deeply rooted in community practice. He is the founder of Synergy Creative Community, a peer-led mental health and creative empowerment initiative established in Brighton and Hove in 2005. Through decades of community work, artistic production, and research, he has developed approaches that combine cultural memory, creative expression, and social healing.
Dr Oquosa’s broader mission is to cultivate symbolic literacy: the capacity to recognise, interpret, and transform the symbols that structure public life. Through research, art, teaching, and digital innovation — including the development of EtuPath as a participatory and digital research tool — he seeks to help communities engage critically with inherited histories while imagining more inclusive and life-affirming futures.
His work stands at the intersection of scholarship, creativity, and spiritual knowledge, offering new ways of understanding how societies remember, forget, and heal.
