A coat can keep out weather. D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem asks it to do more. Her Camo Coat Collection treats a garment as a way to think about visibility, danger, healing and survival in a city. A cape inspired by leaves and by the Yoruba orisa Osanyin can be worn, but it also gives its wearer a part in an invented system of protection. The person inside is neither hidden nor simply displayed. They become an active figure in a question: what would it mean to move through the world equipped for more than the cold?
The SFO Museum's Women of Afrofuturism exhibition displayed Duyst-Akpem's Osanyin Cape with collar and wristlets, dated 2020, and a 2022 self-portrait in a Camo Cape. Born and raised in rural Nigeria, she describes herself as a transnational “space sculptor.” Her practice travels through fashion, performance, writing, installation, sound and teaching. The range might seem sprawling until the coat gives it a centre. Every medium can shape the relation between a body and the place it enters.
The garment is a useful starting point because it cannot be reduced to an illustration of Afrofuturism. It has a material task. It meets the shoulder and arm; it changes a silhouette; it moves when a wearer moves. Duyst-Akpem's account of the collection names logistical and spiritual protection together. Those are distinct needs, and the distinction keeps the project from becoming a costume fantasy detached from everyday life. A person may need shelter, room to move, a sense of confidence, a relation to ancestral knowledge and a way to be seen on their own terms. The coat cannot provide all of those by itself, but it can make them present as design questions.
The leaf as an instrument
The project began with portraits and imagined leaves. During a 2014 fellowship devoted to Black aesthetics and sacred systems, Duyst-Akpem made a series of commemorative portraits and leaf drawings. On her project page, she explains that the leaves were drawn freely from imagination rather than copied from existing plants. They became the basis for hand-drawn textiles and wall coverings, then moved into the garments. This progression matters. The coat's motif is not a botanical specimen pasted onto fabric for decoration. It is a form invented in one medium and made to live in another.
The leaf can suggest shade, food, medicine and camouflage without claiming that a single shape possesses all those functions. In Duyst-Akpem's work, it connects to Osanyin, associated in Yoruba traditions with healing, leaves and forest knowledge. The artist describes depictions of Osanyin as partly human and partly tree. The hybrid figure refuses a sharp boundary between person and environment. A garment made in that orbit allows the wearer to appear neither as a person escaping nature nor as a person absorbed by it. The coat makes an alliance visible.
The museum's description places Osanyin Cape within the larger Camo Coat series and notes its interest in camouflage found in nature. Camouflage is usually imagined as a technique of disappearance. Here it also raises a question of what kind of appearance might be protective. An exaggerated cape may draw attention. Its protection can therefore lie in the authority of the figure it helps create, not only in concealment. The wearer does not necessarily vanish into a background; they choose a relation to it.
Duyst-Akpem connects the work to black-and-white dazzle camouflage, the disruptive striping used to complicate perception, and to the striped Nigerian Tiv textile a'nger. She is careful to identify these as relations within her own design language. Neither military pattern nor traditional cloth is a neutral texture. One belongs to a history of visual disruption under conflict; the other carries social meaning in a community. A contemporary garment can place them near each other, but its success depends on keeping their different histories perceptible. The coat becomes a meeting point rather than a claim that those histories are interchangeable.
She also worked the leaf forms into the installation Wan Chuku and the Mystical Yam Farm. Her project account describes tall yam mound “trees” wrapped in striped textile. The change of scale is instructive: a pattern that can touch a body can also organize a room. In one form it travels with a person; in the other it makes an environment that people enter. The same imaginative leaf moves between garment, surface and site. That movement is central to her self-description as a space sculptor.
Eight ensembles and a book that can be held
On 2 February 2020, Duyst-Akpem launched the Camo Coat Collection with the artist's book AFRIFUTURI 02022020 at Blanc Gallery in Chicago. Her account of the launch lists eight original ensembles shown by models who were themselves artists, performers and scholars. It also credits stylist Sal Yvat, makeup artist Grant Karpin, DJ Sadie Woods and others who helped make the event. The presentation was a performance with many contributors, not an image of garments floating free from the bodies and labor that carried them.
The runway form matters because it lets a coat act in time. A still photograph can show cut and pattern; a walk reveals how a textile rises, folds and changes direction. Duyst-Akpem's interest in protection becomes more pointed when a garment moves through a room before an audience. Who does the audience imagine inside this coat? What stance does the wearer take? How does the body answer a design that has its own sculptural demand? The runway stages those questions in public.
The companion book complicates the collection further. Duyst-Akpem describes AFRIFUTURI 02022020 as a 202-page monograph in a velvet-lined raw wood box. Its contents include holographic details, writings and documentation of performance costumes. The package also includes a clay kola nut used in performance and eight holographic Osanyin leaves. The book is therefore not only a catalogue of objects that once existed elsewhere. It is itself an object designed for handling, opening and sequence.
The custom holograms are especially apt. They make an image change with the angle of the viewer. A leaf no longer has a single stable appearance; it flickers as the box or page moves. This small optical event echoes the garments' interest in camouflage and shifting visibility. The viewer must adjust position to see what the material holds. The form teaches through an action of looking.
Duyst-Akpem says the monograph gathers years of performance, costume, research and teaching. Eight writings sit beside eight costumes in her account. The number is part of her artistic structure, connected in the launch description to a personal relationship with the figure eight. Repetition gives the book a rhythm without making every element identical. A paper, script or recipe can occupy the same collection as an image of a garment, but each asks to be read differently. An archive of Afrofuturist practice need not pretend that theory, performance and daily knowledge use one language.
The publication's physical form also questions how a creative career is preserved. A standard catalogue can classify a coat as fashion and an essay as scholarship, then shelve them apart. Duyst-Akpem binds them in one designed object. The connection does not erase the differences between wearing, reading and watching. It insists that each practice has helped make the others possible.
A garment made for survival
Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower is a declared point of reference for Duyst-Akpem. Butler's novel follows Lauren Olamina through a society in breakdown, where survival requires observation, planning and the ability to build community. Duyst-Akpem taught a course around Butler's legacy that included student-made survival “go” packs. On her Camo Coat page, she places the collection's concerns about spiritual and logistical protection in dialogue with that work.
The relation is more useful than a simple claim that a coat could solve a dystopia. In Butler's fiction, the objects people carry matter because conditions can change abruptly, but an object is only part of a larger practice of attention and cooperation. Duyst-Akpem's coat asks a parallel question in the present: what does one take onto the street, and what kinds of knowledge might that equipment represent? Its speculative language intensifies the question without removing it from urban life.
In her account of CCv2: The Garden Collection, Duyst-Akpem proposes textiles developed from photographs of gardens, connecting the project to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The garden is a different kind of survival image from the ruined city. It requires care, time and conditions that permit growth. Her proposal would carry traces of those cultivated places onto a garment worn elsewhere. The imagined wearer could move through a city with another ecology visible on the body.
The gesture can be read as a refusal of the idea that a future must always be depicted as a machine. Plants have technologies of adaptation; people have histories of growing, gathering and healing. Duyst-Akpem's references to biomimicry and camouflage in nature place design in conversation with those forms. The collection asks how an urban body might borrow from them without pretending that a printed leaf alone can repair an ecological crisis. Its force lies in making the dependency imaginable and difficult to ignore.
The project also touches fashion's own habit of turning protection into style. Military references, technical fabrics and survival pockets often circulate as visual codes with little attention to the lives for which protection is urgent. Duyst-Akpem's writing and performances restore those questions to the garment. Who requires safety? Against what? Who has been permitted to turn fear into an aesthetic? By placing the coat in a web of Black art, Yoruba sacred reference and Butler's speculative fiction, she asks the audience to see more than a dramatic silhouette.
Performance as a second skin
The coat is only one route through Duyst-Akpem's performance world. Her costume archive includes High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars, Black Light Primal Nun 'A' Presents The Ramm Riff and Super Space Riff: An Ode to Mae Jemison and Octavia Butler in VIII Stanzas. The titles announce a cast of emissaries, priestesses and riff-makers. They suggest that a costume can give a performer a role from which to speak differently about history and possibility.
An envoy is sent between places. A priestess holds a form of authority that does not depend on an earthly government. A riff takes an inherited musical or visual phrase and changes it. Even before the details of a performance are known, these titles show Duyst-Akpem working with movement between worlds, positions and media. Her practice can borrow the grandeur of a cosmic mission while keeping its feet in an actual exhibition space before an actual audience.
The title High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars also carries an institutional joke. It sounds like an official appointment, yet its authority is invented by the artist. The figure can enter a space that might ordinarily authorize speech through curators, governments or scientists and claim another office. Such a performance is not simply dressing up as a person from the future. It tests what happens when an artist designs the terms under which a body may speak.
That is why “space sculptor” is more than an eccentric professional description. Sculpture traditionally suggests a shaped object. Duyst-Akpem shapes situations involving objects, wearers, rooms, voices and viewers. A cape changes the space around its wearer. A sound installation asks a body to listen from a position. A performer in costume redraws an audience's sense of who can occupy a stage. Her materials include distance and attention as well as fabric.
Her teaching extends this method. According to 3Arts, she developed courses in Afrofuturity, Afrofuturist ecologies, Black world ritual performance and the spatial forms of African and diasporic sacred systems. Teaching is not a guarantee of artistic force, but in her case the same questions move between classroom and work. A student making a survival pack after reading Butler must decide what a future demands at the scale of the hand. A performer wearing a coat must make a related decision at the scale of a moving body.
The body inside the archive
Duyst-Akpem's work resists being contained by one department. The Osanyin Cape can belong to fashion, design, performance, sculpture and the study of religion, but none of those labels can substitute for its actual operation. It places a fabricated skin around a real body and invites that body to travel through a world already marked by unequal exposure. The leaf, stripe and cape shape become instruments for thinking about what one might need in order to endure and act.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams asks people connected to the Democratic Republic of Congo to imagine other conditions for life while a styled photo story gives those questions visual form. Duyst-Akpem's work begins from other histories, but it shares an interest in the distance between a striking image and the material conditions that would make a better future possible. The question does not end when the camera does.
The artist's book, runway and garden textiles keep returning to the person who handles, wears or sees them. The future is not presented as an empty stage waiting for spectacular objects. It has bodies in it, along with climate, institutions, memory and the need for care. Duyst-Akpem's coat does not promise invulnerability. It asks its wearer and viewer to recognize that protection can be designed, imagined and practiced together. That is a demanding task for a garment, and precisely why it has to remain a garment.