Day three of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival 2025 opened as another feather in the cap of this year’s programme. The festival’s doors opened even wider to new voices and fresh perspectives. The day welcomed budding filmmakers, musicians, and beauticians into the spotlight, creating an intergenerational dialogue that wove together playfulness with politically and socially grounded themes.
Labs, screenings, and live sessions highlighted how creativity continues to serve as a mirror and a tool for transformation within African communities. Audiences were invited to explore subjects ranging from ancestral wisdom to sustainability, livelihood empowerment, the politics of fashion, Western dehumanisation and affirming practices of resistance. Each presentation offered a reminder that art is inseparable from everyday life.
What made the day particularly remarkable was its ability to engage across generations. Young audiences learned from elders about the depth of African traditions and spiritual practices through Amari Rebel’s Nkisi or AI (Ancestral Intelligence) is Our Savior.
This lab reaffirmed Chale Wote’s unique character as an art festival, and a living archive where memory and imagination are co-created.
Amari Rebel infused the day with rhythm and movement, pulling audiences into moments of collective joy that resonated with the festival’s larger commitment to freedom-making.
Meanwhile, the beauticians from Angilo Fashion Institute redefined the conversation around aesthetics by connecting beauty practices to sustainability, heritage, and empowerment.
They demonstrated how intimate acts of self-expression can be sites of resistance and renewal.
The budding filmmakers’ showcase revealed the raw energy of storytelling from younger voices, blending personal narrative with wider historical and cultural memory. Gbolahan Laniyan started the film screening with Kanta: No Challenger.
This film recounted the story of Muhammadu Kanta, the indomitable Hausa warrior-king of Kebbi. He blends history and art to explore the male child’s fight for place in the world while preserving African stories against erasure.
Ato Hasford’s Rhythms of Reclamation is a filmed ritual theatre work blending music, movement, and monologue to confront colonial extraction, betrayal, and queer African survival.
He framed the film as a spiritual invocation and an offering; a survival spell where ancestral memory and resistance converge against erasure. Hasford inserted his body and voice into fraught histories and transforms personal vulnerability into a channel for collective reflection. He reclaims what was meant to be forgotten offering audiences a call to witness, remember, and reimagine futures rooted in truth and love.
The final film of the evening was Ota Benga, directed by Dr. Niyi Coker Jr. and submitted by Morris Frimpong of Colony of Congo. The documentary recounts the harrowing story of Ota Benga, born in 1904 in Congo, who was taken to New York and caged with primates at the Bronx Zoo as a spectacle of Darwin’s theory.
The audience sat in stunned silence, shaken by the film’s raw exposure of dehumanisation. Morris reflected on his shock upon first encountering the story and he is now committed to sharing the documentary’s truth with younger generations. Ota Benga’s story left the audience breathless; a chilling reminder of how atrocity and dehumanisation must be remembered, retold, and never repeated.
Day Three left participants with a profound sense that art, whether through film, sound, or style, is a language of continuity a bridge between past wisdom and future possibility.