Why I left the arts - from art to digital infrastructure to preserve African heritage

And why I'm not sure "left" is even the right word.

I am sitting in Helsinki on a May morning, fifteen degrees outside, the kind of pale Nordic light that makes everything look slightly unreal. I am optimizing SEO content for a heritage platform, cross-checking keyword density, thinking about a woman in the UK who traced her family back to Benin and wrote to me last week asking for help planning a roots trip.

Five years ago today, I was hanging paintings across two UBA bank branches simultaneously, coordinating an exhibition in Cotonou, running between venues to make sure the lighting was right before opening night.

These two images feel far apart. They are not.

The moment I understood the problem

It was 2017. I had just been selected as a laureate of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, one of the most competitive entrepreneurship programs on the continent. Five thousand dollars in seed funding, mentorship, a network of founders across Africa. It was the kind of recognition that changes how you see your own work.

But it also forced a question I had been avoiding.

I had spent years in the arts. Not as a hobbyist, as someone who ran the operational machinery behind creative work. Exhibitions. Artist contracts. Logistics. Communications. Festival production. I was good at it. The Atilebart Group was real, the projects were real, the relationships were real.

And yet, every time we built something beautiful, a show, a catalogue, a collaborative project, it disappeared. Not immediately. But gradually. No archive. No provenance. No way for the work to outlive the room it was shown in. The documentation existed on hard drives that crashed, in Facebook albums that degraded in quality, in the memories of people who eventually moved on.

The cultural work was real. The infrastructure to hold it was not.

That asymmetry started to bother me in a way I could not ignore.

What the arts actually taught me

I want to be precise here, because this is not a story about leaving something broken. The arts gave me everything that matters.

They taught me how humans actually make decisions, not the rational-actor version, but the real version, driven by emotion, status, timing, and trust. Three years of psychology studies had given me the theoretical frame. Eight years of working with artists gave me the practitioner's version.

They taught me how to coordinate without authority. For several years I was part of Effet Graff, one of West Africa's most ambitious street art festivals: artists from thirty countries, walls that stretched further than any single eye could take in. Nobody had formal authority over anyone. You held the project together through relationships, through knowing who needed what and when, through being the person who showed up. That is a different kind of skill than management. It is harder to teach and harder to replace.

They taught me that infrastructure is invisible until it fails. When an exhibition opens cleanly, nobody thinks about the logistics. When the paintings arrive late, everyone notices. The best infrastructure is the kind that lets other people's work shine without calling attention to itself.

I organized two collective exhibitions in Cotonou: one across two UBA bank branches, one at Villa Karo in Grand-Popo. Villa Karo is a Franco-Finnish cultural space, a detail I did not think much about at the time. Standing in that space in Benin, built through a collaboration between two countries, something was already trying to tell me something about what bridges between worlds can produce. I was not ready to hear it yet.

I did not know it then, but I was studying for a different job.

Paris, 2023

My first trip to Europe was in 2023. I had a flight to Helsinki but I booked a deliberate 24-hour layover in Paris. I wanted to see the city. I also had someone to visit: a family friend, a tonton, who worked at the Musée de l'Armée.

He gave me a private tour.

At some point we stood in front of display cases containing objects from Africa. I do not remember the exact words that started the conversation. I remember the feeling, a specific kind of discomfort that is not quite anger and not quite sadness, something more like vertigo. The objects were beautiful. The labels were precise. The building was magnificent. And none of it felt right.

My tonton was uncomfortable too. He has worked there for years. He knows the institution from the inside, its logic, its constraints, the arguments it makes to itself about stewardship and preservation and access. He did not dismiss what I was feeling. But he also lives from the museum. His career is inside those walls.

We talked for hours. We did not resolve anything. We arrived, eventually, at a kind of tacit agreement to let the question stay open between us, unfinished, the way certain important conversations have to remain if they are going to stay honest.

I boarded my flight to Helsinki the next morning thinking about provenance. About who decides what an object means, who has the right to hold it, and what it would take to build systems that answered those questions differently.

That conversation is part of why I do what I do now.

The slow pivot

I did not wake up one morning and decide to become a builder. It happened in layers.

The first layer was frustration. Around 2019, I realized that the tools available to artists and cultural institutions in West Africa were largely built by people who had never set foot there. The platforms, the payment systems, the archiving solutions, all designed for contexts that did not match the operational reality on the ground. Either too expensive, too complex, or solving problems that did not exist while ignoring the ones that did.

I started building websites out of necessity, because someone had to, and eventually people started paying me for it. The tools I was using at the time were not built for what I actually needed. That gap never went away. It just got more precise.

The second layer was curiosity. In 2020, blockchain entered my field of vision, not through speculation, but through a question: what if you could create an irrevocable record of cultural provenance? What if a mask, a painting, a photograph could carry its own history, verifiably, without relying on an institution that might close or a database that might be deleted?

The NFT wave of 2021 was noisy and largely hollow. But underneath the noise, the architecture was real. I spent forty hours on a single course on NFTs, not because I wanted to flip JPEGs, but because I wanted to understand the mechanism. What I found was a primitive but genuine attempt to solve a problem I already cared about: ownership, memory, and provenance in a world where those things are easily erased.

The third layer was commitment. By 2023, I enrolled in a Master's program, starting with AI Solutions Architecture before pivoting after a few months into Blockchain specialization. Not to signal credentials. But because I needed to go deeper than curiosity. I needed to understand the architecture well enough to build on it responsibly.

A concept that named what I already knew

In 2024, studying International Business at Aalto University Business School, I came across the Smile Curve, a concept developed by economist Ram Mudambi. The idea is simple and brutal: in any value chain, the highest returns are captured at the two ends, research and design on one side, branding and distribution on the other. The middle, execution, captures the least.

I had lived the African side of that curve for years without having a name for it. The continent produces extraordinary raw material (cultural, creative, human) and consistently fails to capture the value at either end. The research infrastructure is underfunded. The distribution infrastructure is foreign-owned. What remains is execution: beautiful, skilled, underpaid execution.

That course, alongside a certification in Project Management at Åbo Akademi and an Advanced Project-Based Management program back at Aalto, gave me a more rigorous frame for what I had been building intuitively. Infrastructure is not a support function. It is where the value actually lives.

What I am actually building

Why African heritage needs digital infrastructure

For practical examples of platforms and projects I work on, see the Lab and my About page.

The through-line, looking back, is always the same question: who controls the record?

Now I build infrastructure that tries to shift that balance, incrementally, practically, without pretending it is a revolution.

Ouidah Origins is a concierge platform for the African diaspora reconnecting with Benin. It exists because the information needed to make that journey, the right guides, the right context, the right itinerary, was scattered, unreliable, or simply absent. Someone had to organize it. I happened to be the person who understood both the digital side and the on-ground reality.

Africa Digital Assets is a members-only hospitality network that tokenizes access to the continent's most exclusive stays. It exists because there is a surging class of global Africans seeking world-class experiences on the continent, and the infrastructure to serve them has been largely built by people who do not understand them.

A portfolio of nine destination platforms across Benin, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire, Visit Ganvié, Visit Abomey, Visit Grand-Popo, Visit Assinie, and others, exists because West Africa's heritage is extraordinary and largely invisible to the people who should be its primary audience. Some of these platforms have already started generating leads without any active promotion. The SEO work pays off. I spend a significant part of my time on it. Like this morning.

Beyond the platforms, I still work directly with galleries, framers, artists, NGOs, and associations on their digital presence. The problems are different. The logic is the same.

And sometimes, the old world calls back directly. A few weeks ago, a team at the Benin Ministry of Living Environment needed a painting commissioned and delivered as a farewell gift for their outgoing minister. They contacted me. From 8,800 kilometers away, I coordinated the entire production in 48 hours. The painting was delivered on time. The network built over years of working in Cotonou's creative ecosystem held perfectly across the distance.

That is what infrastructure actually means: the capacity to act, reliably, even when you are not in the room.

The last exhibition

The last time I worked on an exhibition was here in Helsinki, as assistant producer for PurkuTaide, a Finnish contemporary art collective. It was part of a language internship, and I wanted to make it useful in more ways than one. It reminded me of everything I had always loved about this world: the chaos that somehow resolves into something beautiful, the particular energy of people who care deeply about what they are making, the satisfaction of watching a space come together in the final hours.

Working with artists and slightly mad, deeply committed people is still one of my favorite things. That has not changed.

One more thing I have not finished

I am also writing a novel. Fiction. The premise is simple on the surface: the first African colony on Mars. What it actually asks is harder: what does a people carry with them when they leave everything behind? What counts as heritage when there is no soil, no river, no ancestral compound? What does sovereignty mean at that distance?

I do not know yet how it ends. I am close. The questions the book asks and the questions my work asks are, I have slowly realized, the same questions. I just answer them in different registers.

Did I leave the arts?

I am still not sure.

I still shoot street photography. I still produce when the project is right. More than half the people I am close to are painters, musicians, or artisans. I still believe that culture is the most important thing humans make, not as sentiment, but as a structural argument. Culture is how a people hold themselves together across time. It is the original infrastructure.

What changed is the layer I work at. I used to work at the surface, the show, the event, the moment of contact between a work and its audience. Now I work underneath, the systems that make it possible for those moments to be recorded, owned, and transmitted.

The Smile Curve taught me that the ends of the chain are where value accumulates. The arts taught me that the middle is where meaning lives. I am trying to hold both.

The conversation in Paris is still open. I think it has to stay that way.