ABJ

Info

• Title : ABJ

• Year : 2024

• Medium : Installation with multichannel sound, video, photography, and sculptural elements

• Duration : Variable.

Details

ABJ is an immersive sound-and-film installation examining how migration shapes daily life in Abidjan, the cultural and economic center of Côte d’Ivoire. Named after the city’s IATA airport code, the work traces how generations of migrants from across West and North Africa have transformed Abidjan into a dynamic crossroads of languages, cuisines, music, and styles.

Focusing on the city’s bustling markets – spaces where trade, culture, and community converge – the installation uses multichannel sound, field recordings, and moving image to evoke the calls of vendors, the rhythms of negotiation, and the pulse of collective urban life.

Personal narratives anchor the work. Interviews with migrants, long-term residents, and cultural figures reveal experiences of arrival, adaptation, creativity, and belonging. These voices expand outward into Abidjan’s wider cultural landscape—its fashion, food, music, and everyday expressions shaped by constant movement.

ABJ offers a sensory portrait of a city defined less by borders than by exchange, capturing the vibrancy and multiplicity that migration brings to Abidjan’s present and future.

Request full project dossier