Ìyá Nlá
The Great Mother
01 / INHERITANCE
Begin with the context.
Ìyá Nlá is honoured within Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ traditions, where motherhood and female powers are approached through performance and social relationships.
Place & variation
Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ traditions among Yorùbá-Nago communities in Benin, Nigeria and Togo. Local histories and interpretations vary.
02 / SYSTEM — EDITORIAL ANALYSIS
Presence & embodiment.
Reverence for motherhood links performance to the continuity of social life.
This is the archive’s reading of a structure or relationship, not a claim that the tradition was designed as a modern technology.
03 / FUTURE — INHERITED FUTURES SPECULATION
What would we build if sustaining life were the central measure of power?
Imagine social infrastructure organised around sustaining life rather than extracting from it.
An artistic proposition to explore. Historical documentation does not establish the technological analogy.
FOLLOW THE RESEARCH
Sources & context.
The linked sources distinguish collection evidence, research and contextual reading. They support the inheritance layer; the system and future layers are editorial interpretations.
- 01UNESCO — Oral heritage of Gelede ↗Institutional heritage record · Opens source
- 02Babatunde Lawal — The Gelede Spectacle ↗Scholarly context / field research · Opens source
Research edition 01 · September 2026. A desk-research synthesis; not a practitioner-certified account. Some linked books and articles require library access. Read the evidence guide ↗
Follow another thread.
Editorial links connect shared themes, objects and practices. They do not make the records interchangeable.