Diran Aderinto’s Iṣilọ Builds Attention Through Rhythm & Collective Presence

Blending moving-image, spoken reflection, social performance, and site-responsive presentation, Diran Aderinto’s Iṣilọ – A Settlement Story turns away from spectacle and toward the everyday.

In Yoruba,ron iṣilọ (pronounced e see lor) refers to emigration, migration, or relocation, the act of moving from one place to another and settling elsewhere. Diran draws on this layered meaning not as a literal translation, but as a conceptual frame, treating movement less as an event to be explained than as a condition to be lived andnegotiated over time.

“Arrival is treated not as an event, but as a condition.”

The first thing Iṣilọ – A Settlement Story asks of its audience is patience. There is no opening. statement, no contextual framing, no guiding voice to explain what is about to unfold.

Instead, Diran allows the work to arrive through small, ordinary moments: the rhythm of a commute, a half-finished conversation in a shared room, the soft thud of a football striking tarmac on a public pitch. These fragments accumulate into a portrait of settlement that feels less like a story being told and more like a condition being lived.

In a cultural landscape where questions of movement and belonging are often filtered through singular artistic forms such as documentary, performance, or social research, Diran’s approach operates across boundaries.

Iṣilọ brings together moving image, sound, spoken reflection, social choreography, and site-responsive presentation to produce an experience that unfolds through both body and attention.

Its politics are not declared but embedded in how these elements are allowed to sit beside one another, asking the audience to watch, listen, and inhabit at the same time.

At the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, the work found an early and sustained audience within a setting shaped by critique and exchange. Students, researchers, and curators encountered Iṣilọ not as a finished object but as a practice in motion.

Viewings often extended into discussion, with conversations circling questions of authorship, ethical proximity, and the responsibilities of representation. The work became a reference point within a wider pedagogical environment, a way of thinking through how social experience can be translated into visual and spatial form without being reduced to illustration.

“The work was encountered not as a finished object, but as a practice in motion.” The work’s layered character becomes especially visible in moments where voice, movement, and environment converge.

In one sequence, a participant reflects on the difficulty of getting into the workforce. The subtitle rests quietly at the bottom of the frame as figures move across the pitch behind them. Spoken testimony, physical motion, and ambient sound form a single composition. It reads at once as oral history, social performance, and spatial observation.

Meaning emerges not from any single element, but from their coexistence. Audience responses within the academic setting often reflected this hybridity. Some viewers engaged through the language of craft, remarking that the dialogue felt as if it were scripted, even though it emerged from lived conversation.

Others spoke about the work in more personal terms, describing it as one of the best memories created for us, framing it less as an object to be analysed than as a shared experience. The work moved fluidly between these registers, inviting both critical distance and emotional closeness.

The project’s presentation beyond the university offered a different way of encountering the work. It also had a stint at Freedom Park in Lagos, where viewers often came across it between conversations and everyday activity. This shift did not replace the work’s academic grounding, but suggested how its meaning can change slightly depending on where and how it is seen.

Formally, Iṣilọ resists the narrative arcs associated with both documentary and performance. Its pacing is shaped by rhythm and repetition, borrowing from musical and choreographic structures. Bureaucratic routines, housing negotiations, and work schedules return like refrains.

These elements do not rise into moments of drama. Instead, they form the underlying pattern of how time is experienced and how bodies move through institutional and social space.

One of the work’s most effective gestures lies in its attention to minor social exchanges, many of which unfold on and around the football pitch. A passing remark between players. An awkward pause at the edge of the field. A fleeting look is exchanged before play resumes.

These moments function as small, performative scenes in which power, belonging, and recognition are quietly rehearsed. Even when the work briefly extends into the surrounding public space, including in passing at Freedom Park, it carries the same sensitivity to the social textures of encounter.

The work does not frame these moments as evidence or commentary. Their weight accumulates through repetition and proximity. Against this steady restraint, Diran introduces the football pitch as a space of embodied counterpoint.

Here, the work leans into physical performance and collective movement. Cooperation and play temporarily reorganise relationships, allowing identity to be expressed through action rather than explanation. These sequences shift the tempo of the piece, opening it toward collective energy and improvisation.

Visually and sonically, Iṣilọ maintains an ethic of closeness. The camera remains near faces and gestures, often at eye level. Sound is treated as environmental texture rather than an expressive score. Overcast skies, ambient city noise, and the subdued acoustics of domestic interiors create a sensorial field that feels inhabited rather than designed.

The work begins to resemble installation as much as moving image, something that can be entered as well as viewed. Silence plays a subtle structural role. It creates pauses between speech, movement, and interaction, allowing moments to settle. These intervals guide attention in a way closer to choreography or musical composition than to narrative storytelling.

There are moments when this cross-disciplinary approach begins to suggest its own limits. The focus remains closely held around those directly experiencing settlement, leaving institutional and community perspectives largely outside the frame. While this maintains the work’s ethical commitment to lived experience, it also narrows the range of voices in play.

At times, this restraint risks tipping into reticence, leaving broader social structures felt rather than fully interrogated. At the same time, Diran has already engaged in participatory research as part of the project, grounding the work in shared reflection and lived collaboration rather than detached observation.

He has described Iṣilọ as an ongoing process rather than a finished statement, with plans to build on it in future iterations. Extending these participatory elements into more visible forms of public dialogue and collaborative authorship could broaden the work’s social and critical reach, opening it toward a wider network of collective and institutional engagement.

“Rather than speaking for its subjects, the work makes space beside them.”

What ultimately distinguishes Iṣilọ – A Settlement Story is its refusal to offer conclusions. Diran is less interested in where his subjects end up than in how they move, wait, adapt, and connect along the way.

The work’s quiet power lies in this sustained attention. It asks not for sympathy or agreement, but for a way of looking that mirrors the recognition it suggests is often missing from everyday encounters. In staying with the moment, Iṣilọ proposes a different model for how art can engage with shared experience.

Rather than speaking for its subjects, it makes space beside them. It invites its audience to consider not only what it means to arrive somewhere new, but what it means to notice the act of arrival as it unfolds, in conversation, in play, and in the spaces in between.