Art and culture advocacy organisation, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), has unveiled plans for the 2025 edition of its flagship project, the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF).
The festival holds from November 10 till 16 at two venues – Freedom Park Lagos Island, and the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, Onikan, Lagos.
The theme for the 27th edition of LABAF, according to the Programme Chair of CORA, who is also the festival director, Jahman Anikulapo, is
“Change: Imagining Alternatives.”
Main Features of the festival include: Conversations, Networking, Workshops, Mentorships, Children Festival, 12 Plenaries on politics, culture and society; 4 Sessions on Literature in the Digital Age (AI, etc); 10 BookTreks (book chats) on fiction, drama, poetry, nonfiction; and
2 days of Green Festival.
Also scheduled to take place are 2 days of Open Mic, 2 days of Poetry Competition, 2 days of CORA Youth Creative Clubs, 5 visual events/exhibitions, 4 performances – drama, dance, poetry, etc;
4 film screenings,
2 Literary Parties, etc.
A statement from the LABAF Programme directorate explains reasons for the theme of the 2025 LABAF.
“Our subject, this year, is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy. The 62-programme of events during the festival hope to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world headlined by Herdsmen killings, Boko Haram atrocities, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives, and dramas in which hope, doggedness, and the will to win, is a key subject.”
The statement continues: “the focus of the festival remains Literacy Campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions, hence, the 62 events that would be held in the course of the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using the various disciplines of the arts – literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc – to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening and consequently empowering (3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.
“The ultimate aim is to explore the artistic and cultural resources of the nation to help develop its human capital resources for the benefit of the entire society.”
It also explained that “The festival is an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except to vendors with merchandises,” said the Program Chair, explaining that since its birth in 1999, the festival has been intentional about remaining open-air and free-access because it was “conceived as CORA’s contribution to the spread of literacy towards boosting the capacity of the human resources of the nation, and by extension the African continent, to grow its economic potentialities.”
