ÙRHỌ̀TỌ̀ (The Altar Remembers) a 42-second film imagining the first night the Met's Benin altar tableau comes home.

The source is an 18th-century cast-brass ùrhọ̀tọ̀ (ancestral altar tableau) with an iyọ́bà a queen mother and her attendants, made at the Court of Benin, taken in 1897, and held at The Met since (Accession 1991.17.111). In New York it's an artwork behind glass. On an altar in Benin City, it's an ancestor with a job: keeping a queen mother present among her descendants. That gap is the film.

Rather than remixing the object, I built the world around it: a day in the gallery where no one stops, the crossing back over the ocean, and the first candle lit for her in 129 years. The tableau itself is never altered its exact composition, patina, and figures are preserved in every shot. Hands only place it; nothing "restores" it. The film ends on the line it exists for: "Tonight, you are not art. You are ancestor."

Built entirely in FLORA: three Open Access reference images from The Met drive every generation; the canvas shows the full trail references, prompts, the three parts, a custom-designed narrator voice, an ambient sound bed, and the final cut, including the failed takes along the way.

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/316580