Trading Places
Info
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Title : Trading Places
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Year : 2024
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Medium : Sound installation comprising ten sculptural sound trays with embedded loudspeakers.
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Duration : Variable.
Details
Trading Places is a sound installation situated within an evolving practice that fuses music, sound sculpture, and immersive installation. The work builds on Ogboh’s earlier project Market Symphony (2019), where enamelware market trays served as sonic carriers for field recordings embedded within the exhibition architecture. While Market Symphony focused on the everyday rhythms of Lagos markets, Trading Places extends this sculptural language by introducing electronic composition alongside field recordings. Here, the trays are housed within self-contained wooden enclosures fitted with loudspeakers, transforming the work from an architectural intervention into a series of autonomous sound objects that function as both sculptural forms and acoustic devices.
The installation brings together the rhythmic calls of street hawkers and the frenetic soundscape of stock-exchange trading floors. Conceived as a sensory bridge between grassroots commerce and high finance, the work examines shared logics of trade, currency, and value across different social and economic contexts. Each sculptural unit is based on a metal hawker’s tray, embedded with a loudspeaker and encased within a wooden structure that evokes institutional trading environments. Through this convergence of sound and form, Trading Places I invites listening as a way to experience economic systems as lived human activity, shaped by voice, rhythm, and material presence.
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