ABJ

Info

• Title : ABJ

• Year : 2024

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

• Duration : Variable.

Details

ABJ is an immersive multichannel sound-and-film installation examining how migration shapes everyday life in Abidjan. Taking its title from ABJ, the IATA code for Abidjan’s international airport, the work traces how migration from across West and North Africa have shaped the city through language, food, music, fashion and forms of social exchange.

Developed through field recordings, moving image and conversations with migrants and residents, ABJ moves between markets, kitchens, streets and cultural spaces across the city. The markets form important points of encounter – places where people, commodities, ingredients, languages and traditions circulate. The work brings these environments together with the voices of traders, chefs, street-food sellers, musicians, producers, designers and other cultural practitioners whose experiences reveal Abidjan as a city continually shaped through movement and exchange.

Within the installation, moving images are projected onto stacks of woven plastic bags commonly known as “Ghana Must Go” bags. Widely associated across West Africa with travel, trade and migration, the bags become both projection surface and sculptural structure, embedding histories of movement and displacement within the physical architecture of the work.

Food forms another central thread. Ingredients sourced from the markets lead into culinary histories and practices carried across borders, while garba, one of Côte d’Ivoire’s most widely consumed dishes, becomes a particularly resonant example of cultural transmission. Its history – linked to Nigerian migrant workers in Abidjan and its subsequent absorption into Ivorian food culture – speaks to the ways migration can move from arrival and adaptation towards belonging and collective identity.

Through multiple channels of sound and image, ABJ brings these intersecting narratives together as a layered portrait of a city in constant formation. Rather than approaching migration simply as movement from one place to another, the work listens to what movement produces and leaves behind: new tastes, sounds, languages, relationships and cultural forms that become inseparable from the places in which they take root.

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