The CounterText interview : Ogutu Muraya

Abstract

Beginning with a discussion of Ogutu Muraya’s ongoing work, ‘The Ocean is Always Trying to Pull You in’, extracts from which are published in this issue of CounterText, this conversation between Muraya and Mario Aquilina explores Muraya’s artistic practice. What arises from this short but condensed exchange, beyond Muraya’s countertextual relations to the literary, are reflections on migration, liberation, on the poetics of his work, especially its strong roots in orature and storytelling, and on the artist’s relation to the past and to the possibility of a future in the context of decisive sociopolitical forces. Muraya’s artistic practice is not easily pigeon-holed within generic categories because it combines performance, orature, writing, installation, and more across a range of different modalities. However, it is its combination of the personal with the political, its movement from the tangible to the abstract, and its practice of experimentation and of exploration of an idea that make it, among other things, also markedly ‘essayistic’.