Pelemo Nyajo – MOWAA Listening Sessions Call and Response

Project Description:
Pelemo’s project is an experimental exploration of memory, exclusion, and what it means to be remembered. It asks simple but urgent questions: who gets preserved, who is forgotten, and who gets to decide? Focusing on disabled bodies and other marginalized identities, the work reflects on how systems shape what we see, keep, and value and how so many stories are left out, overlooked, or erased. 

Through poetry, video, and visual imagery, the project brings attention to what is missing and makes space for it. It centers the stories and experiences that are often pushed aside. In doing so, it imagines a more inclusive way of remembering, where different kinds of bodies, voices, and lives are considered and held with care in museums and the world.

Pelemo Nyajo is an artist known for her radical and honest approach towards social development, especially advancing the rights of women and girls with disabilities. Her experience working in roles like being a youth advisor with the Dutch Embassy, a member of the board of trustees of Plan International Nigeria, a poet and young influencer with UNICEF has shaped her understanding of advocacy and fueled her love for advocacy. She has interacted deeply with social issues like exclusion from education, discrimination and stigma as a person with a disability and that has shaped her passion using poetry as a conduit for expression and social action. She is a global young influencer with Plan International, a 2 time Ted speaker, a Youth Day Spotlight awardee by NGYouthSDGs and Oxfam, an awardee of the EU-Youth Empowerment Fund, as well as the British Council Unlimited Micro Awards. She has also won the Yiaga Africa Grant for Art for Democracy. She mainstreams disability inclusion and advocacy through her initiative: Movement Beyond Walls, where she closes the gap between persons with and without disabilities through informal education, and re-engineers culture and socialization towards more acceptance for diversity, advancing towards love and inclusion for all people.