Ore Disu: Dreaming of New Worlds in Conversation with Old Ones

In this episode, we travel to Benin City, Nigeria, to speak with Ore Disu, a visionary cultural strategist and founding director of the Institute of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA). Ore is reshaping how we understand history, art, and African identity. From childhood days spent leafing through family photo albums in Lagos to building a groundbreaking institution at the heart of Nigeria’s cultural resurgence, Ore’s journey is rooted in care and creative reclamation. In this conversation, she reflects on how objects, stories, and even food become vessels of memory and belonging—and why repatriation must mean more than the return of artifacts but also be about revitalizing artist spaces so African creativity can flourish.

JUMP TO

02:00… Ore starts the conversation with an invocation in Yoruba: “The river, no matter how far it flows, always knows its source.”

04:40… Ore explains how museums create spaces where you can connect to people who “don't immediately have an obvious association or commonality with you”.

06:50… Learn about the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) as both a space of memory and of evidenced history, but also a space for current creativity and future imagining.

08:30… The connection between Timbuktu and the work of MOWWA and why reimagining “citadels of knowledge” and investing in memory is so important.

12:30… Ore discusses how in African culture and traditions, community was often more important than permanence and how that can help us define modern African cultural values.

16:50… Ore pushes back against being “villagized” and instead highlights the importance of movement across the continent to tell African stories.

20:54… Ore goes on to look at how art and material culture can erase artificial lines and colonial boundaries.

25:26… “Dream big!” Ore looks at what restitution could look like, beyond just the returning of objects, but revitalizing ecosystems for artists and artisanal spaces which she says has the potential to be a more powerful enterprise.

33.00… To ward off from this becoming a “restitution moment” of feel-good photo ops, what do we as Africans, as Black people, want out of it?

33.50… This week, something special as Dreaming in Color’s Cora Daniels rounds out the program with her outro debut.