how olalekan jeyifous reshapes worldly contingencies with speculative design

Mar 26, 2026 - 22:00

how olalekan jeyifous reshapes worldly contingencies with speculative design

jeyifous rehearses the future through speculative utopias

For Olalekan Jeyifous, the future is not a distant horizon but a parallel condition: one that exists beside the present, waiting to be visualized. Trained as an architect but working fluidly across installation, illustration, and public art, the Brooklyn-based artist and designer has built a practice grounded less in solving problems than in reframing them. His work does not propose masterplans or fixed outcomes. Instead, it operates in the fertile terrain of speculation, where design becomes a narrative device and utopia a method of inquiry.

‘I think of a lot of these speculative projects as existing in the now, but in an alternate reality,’ says Jeyifous, describing a practice that collapses temporal boundaries and situates possibility within the present tense.

This insistence on the ‘now’ is key. Jeyifous’ visions, dense, vibrant, and often infrastructurally improbable, are not escapist fantasies. They are counterfactuals, deliberate reconfigurations of social, political, and environmental systems that reveal the contingencies of the world as it is. While speculative design often leans dystopian, Jeyifous positions utopia as a productive counterbalance, not as a naive ideal, but as a critical strategy. His projects do not ignore crisis. Many are shaped by climate change, displacement, and systemic inequality. Yet they refuse the inevitability of these conditions, proposing instead alternative trajectories grounded in community resilience and cultural specificity.

portrait by Matt Dutile

speculative design as spatial storytelling

Jeyifous’ work is often described through the lens of Afrofuturism, but its operative logic is architectural. Drawings resemble elevations and sections. Installations read like fragments of imagined cities. Yet unlike traditional architecture, these projects do not aspire to be built. They are, as he has frames it, a way of ‘using design as a tool for imagination rather than problem solving.’

Emerging from an early engagement with architectural representation, his practice has expanded to include collage, animation, and large-scale public works, each medium chosen for its ability to carry narrative. Through this expanded toolkit, Olalekan Jeyifous constructs layered worlds that are at once familiar and estranged. Lagos is rendered as a vertical patchwork of informal settlements. Brooklyn is transformed into a network of climate-adaptive micro ecosystems. Speculative infrastructures blend vernacular ingenuity with futuristic technology.

These environments are not neutral. They foreground questions of access, equity, and belonging, concerns rooted in the spatial politics of the Black diaspora and the lived realities of cities undergoing rapid transformation. His work consistently returns to the relationship between architecture and power, examining how built environments encode systems of exclusion while also holding the potential for collective reimagination.

Jeyifous imagines: the NY Institute of Aetherism & Alchemy’s Department of Urban Biotopes & Phytomechanics

jeyfous employs Utopia as critical tool

In projects like ‘Nairobi 2081 A.D.’ and ‘Shanty Megastructures,’ informal architecture becomes a site of innovation rather than deficiency. High-rise structures clad in salvaged materials, punctuated by vegetation and solar systems, invert dominant narratives of development by embedding technological advancement within local contexts. Rather than imposing a homogenized, glass and steel futurism, these works suggest that the future can, and must, emerge from the textures and histories of place.

Similarly, with ‘Bodega Ecohaven’, Olalekan Jeyifous reimagines Brooklyn as a network of self-sustaining microclimates, where community infrastructures evolve in response to environmental pressures. Bubble farms, rainwater harvesting systems, and energy-generating flora form a speculative ecology that is both fantastical and grounded in existing technologies. Here, utopia operates not as perfection, but as a rehearsal, a way of testing how different systems might coexist. This approach aligns with Jeyifous’ broader understanding of design as a cultural and political act. His work challenges viewers to consider relationships between art, politics, popular culture, and the cultural imaginary, positioning the future as a contested space shaped by competing narratives.

Nairobi 2081 A.D., illustration for the lookbook of the Ikiré Jones Fashion Collection, Vigilism, 2013

between public space and the imaginary

While much of Jeyifous’ practice unfolds in speculative imagery, it also extends into physical space through public art and installations. Projects like ‘Crown Ether’ and ‘The Boom and the Bust’ translate his thematic concerns into sculptural form, engaging audiences in shared environments and embedding speculative thinking within everyday experience. These works often operate as what might be called ‘utopian fragments,’ partial manifestations of larger imagined systems. They do not attempt to fully realize the futures depicted in his drawings. Instead, they create moments of encounter that invite viewers to inhabit, however briefly, an alternative spatial logic.

This oscillation between the imaginary and the material is central to Jeyifous’ methodology. By moving between representation and realization, he resists the binary between art and architecture, using each to inform the other. Speculative images gain weight through their connection to real-world contexts, while built interventions acquire new layers of meaning through their association with imagined futures.

‘Crown Ether’ at Coachella 2017 | image courtesy of Olalekan Jeyifous

imagining the terms of the future through alternative presents

At its core, Jeyifous’ practice is concerned with who gets to imagine the future, and how. His work challenges the dominance of Western, technocratic visions of progress, proposing instead a multiplicity of futures shaped by diverse cultural perspectives and lived experiences. This is particularly evident in his engagement with cities like Lagos, which recur throughout his work not as sites of deficiency, but as laboratories of possibility. By centering these contexts, Jeyifous disrupts conventional hierarchies of development and reframes informality as a source of innovation.

Utopia, in this sense, becomes less about arriving at an ideal state and more about expanding the field of what can be imagined. It is a method for questioning assumptions, exposing inequities, and articulating alternatives, a way of thinking through design rather than simply designing solutions. In a moment marked by overlapping crises, Jeyifous’s work offers a different kind of optimism, one that is grounded in complexity, attentive to history, and open to contradiction. His speculative worlds do not promise easy answers. Instead, they invite us to consider that the future is not something to be predicted or controlled, but something to be collectively authored, one image, one narrative, one possibility at a time.