In an art world obsessed with mediums — are you a filmmaker? a theatre maker? a performer? — Alfie Nze is asking a different question: What if the question chooses the medium?For sixteen years, from 2010 to 2026,
Nigerian-Italian artist Alfie Nze has quietly built one of the most radical practices on the Afro-European art scene. He does not call himself a filmmaker, or a theatre director, or a performer. He calls himself what he is: an evolutionary artist.
MORE THAN AN ARTIST — AN INVESTIGATION
Most artists produce works. Alfie Nze produces investigations.His practice unfolds across theatre, opera, film, installation, performance, publication, and artistic research — not as separate careers, but as one continuous inquiry. Rather than producing isolated objects for galleries, he develops long-term artistic investigations that are allowed to evolve, mutate, and find their own form.In Nze’s universe, a question asked in a theatre rehearsal in Lagos might become a film in Naples. A performance in a village square might become a publication. A workshop with migrants might become an opera. A piece of artistic research might become a collaborative platform that outlives the artist himself.He does not force the art into a box. He lets the inquiry determine the form.
BETWEEN NIGERIA AND ITALY: A PRACTICE OF TWO HOMES
Working between Nigeria and Italy, Alfie Nze lives and works in the in-between — the very space millions of Africans in the diaspora inhabit daily.It is from this in-between that his core themes emerge: language, migration, environmental justice, ritual, collective memory, and systems of value.These are not trendy topics for him. They are lived realities. What does it mean to speak a language that is not your mother tongue? What does it mean to carry a ritual across the Mediterranean? How does a community remember when its archive has been displaced? How do we value a life, a story, a forest, a border?Nze does not answer these questions with slogans. He answers them with process.
“I BEGIN WITH OBSERVATION”
His artist statement is disarmingly simple, and profoundly radical:_“I begin with observation. Every project starts with a question rather than a medium. Research gradually reveals the artistic form.”_In an industry that rewards speed and output, Nze chooses slowness and observation. He watches. He listens. He researches. He allows the work to tell him what it wants to be.This is why his 2010–2026 body of work cannot be read as a list of shows or films. It must be read as a living archive — an evolving ecosystem where each project feeds the next.
WHY ALFIE NZE MATTERS NOW
At a time when AfroCaribbean and Afro-European conversations are demanding more than representation — demanding complexity, depth, and new forms — Alfie Nze offers a blueprint.He proves that you do not have to choose between theatre and film, between Nigeria and Italy, between ritual and research. You can hold all of it. You can let a work be theatre in one country and an installation in another. You can let art be as migratory as the people who make it.He is not just making art about migration. His art migrates.
