Mayowa 'Shutabug' Alabi

On Thursday, it was Christmas.. Friday, people went to the mosque. Saturday, Lagos was at Eyo festival. Sunday, church..

In the space of four days, belief systems shifted, clothes changed, rituals rotated. And the city moved on as it always does. People showed up. People lived.

Someone pointed this out online, casually. Almost as a passing thought. That underneath all the calendars, customs, and convictions, we are simply moving through life together. Shutabug responded not with an argument, but with an image.

The artwork showed people from different faiths sharing the same space. Christians. Muslims. Traditional worshippers. No hierarchy. No separation. Just presence. Bodies next to bodies. Humanity uninterrupted.

And somehow, the image said everything the tweet could not finish.

Art has a way of doing that. It collapses distance. It removes the need to persuade. You don’t have to agree with it. You just have to look.

In a society where difference is often exaggerated and weaponised, we forget how close we already are. Religion. Tribe. Class. Language. These things become borders instead of context. Lines drawn so thick that we stop seeing the person standing in front of us.

Yet daily life tells a different story.

We attend each other’s weddings. We share food across beliefs. We dance at festivals we don’t fully understand. We exist side by side more often than we admit. The conflict isn’t always in how we live. It’s in how we frame each other.

That’s what the artwork quietly reminds us.

Before belief, there is breath. Before identity, there is presence. Before difference, there is being human.

The power of the piece is not in its message, but in its refusal to dramatise it. No moral lesson. No demand for unity. Just a mirror held up to reality as it already exists.

And maybe that’s where creativity matters most. Not in shouting solutions, but in gently returning us to what we already know and keep forgetting.

At the end of the day, we are just people.

Sometimes, it takes art to help us remember.

*Artworks on this page are by May.owa 'Shutabug' Alabi. All rights remain with the artist.

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