Money Must Be Made is a multidisciplinary project that explores atypical patterns of urban change through the observation of two contrasting realities in Lagos, Nigeria: the one of the multi-storey building of the Financial Trust House and the one of the Balogun street Market. Until the 1990s, the Financial Trust House hosted banks, international airlines and corporate firms but after the formation of the Balogun Market, the second biggest street market in West Africa, the building now lives unoccupied. While in the rest of Lagos, as in most other cities around the world, the arrival of Western corporations often causes displacement of local businesses, in this particular area of Lagos Island, it happened quite the opposite: street vendors took over the area entirely, and through the sale of products mostly coming from China, they now provide the biggest source of business locally, forcing out the financial companies. After taking photographs, interviewing locals and the owner of the building, as well as collecting found materials and objects, Vitturi returned to London and continued to work in his studio. Through a continuous process of assembling objects – manually-altered with paint and pigments – into still lives and sculptures to be photographed, printed, reassembled and then re-photographed Vitturi observed local contrasting realities that reveal the complexity of Lagos’ society and economy, and that of the geopolitical landscape at large.

(Words by Emmanuel Iduma)