Tobi Ayé is a grief worker, educator and artist, whose work explores colonial trauma, loss, death and memory.

Working under the title An anthropology of presence, she approaches photography as a relational and non-extractive practice shaped through proximity, repetition, and shared time.

Self-taught, photography entered her process gradually through her experiences in Benin, where making images often requires navigating complex relationships to visibility, trust, and representation. For many, the camera carries fear and suspicion, rooted both in cultural beliefs around images and in lived experiences of photographers extracting stories and photographs for their own benefit.

Her approach emerged in response to this reality. Rather than arriving only to take images, she spends time building relationships: returning, listening, being transparent about her intentions, and allowing trust to develop slowly. Research, conversations, observations, and shared presence become as important as the photographs themselves.

Drawing from an anthropological lens while remaining attentive to its extractive and colonial histories, her work does not seek to capture or define. Instead, it attends to gestures, atmospheres, silences, and the subtle ways people inhabit spaces, movement, and relation.

Born and raised in Benin and shaped by movement across geographies, her practice is guided by slowness, care, and the ethics of being-with, staying close to what is visible, and what chooses to remain unseen.

picture by Clarita Maria