Lagos State of Mind III

Info

• Title : Lagos State of Mind III

• Year : 2017/2020

• Medium : 18-channel sound installation, painted wall, galvanized steel and aluminum street sign, U-Bahn metro sign, concrete slab, vinyl wall graphic.

• Duration : Variable.

Details

Lagos State of Mind III is an immersive sound and spatial installation that brings Lagos and Berlin into a shared perceptual field. Developed from lived experience between both cities, the work explores how movement between places can reshape memory, orientation and the ways urban space is internally mapped.

Rather than presenting Lagos and Berlin as separate locations, the installation allows them to overlap. Their transit systems, street voices, announcements, routes and visual markers are brought into relation, producing a hybrid geography in which one city is continually encountered through the memory and structure of the other.

The exhibition space is defined by cadmium-yellow walls encircled by two horizontal black stripes. The colour and graphic language recall the visual identity of Lagos’s Danfo buses, while also entering into dialogue with Berlin’s public transport system and the ordered logic of its urban routes. Within the installation, these transport systems become more than references to mobility: they operate as frameworks through which the cities are remembered, navigated and mentally connected.

This convergence is extended through an imagined remapping of Berlin’s transport network. The logic of the Ringbahn is symbolically expanded to incorporate key Lagos bus terminals, collapsing physical distance and allowing both cities to occupy the same cartographic space. Familiar systems of orientation are disrupted and recomposed, creating an urban geography shaped as much by memory and association as by actual location.

Sound activates this constructed environment. Berlin U-Bahn announcements and station names merge with the calls of Lagos bus conductors, itinerant street hawkers and other recordings from the everyday acoustic life of both cities. These voices form a layered composition in which the regulated language of public transport intersects with the improvised, highly social forms of communication that animate Lagos’s streets and buses.

Interwoven recordings of African expatriates learning German introduce another register of movement and adaptation. Language becomes part of the process through which unfamiliar environments are entered, negotiated and gradually absorbed, adding a more intimate human dimension to the broader sonic relationship between the two cities.

Objects within the installation reinforce this displacement of place. A Berlin U-Bahn station sign and a solitary signpost carry hybridised names such as Obalendeplatz and Lagosstrasse, inserting Lagos landmarks and linguistic references into the visual grammar of Berlin. These invented locations suggest a city that exists somewhere between memory, lived experience and imagination.

Through sound, colour, signage and spatial intervention, Lagos State of Mind III constructs a city that does not exist geographically but emerges through the experience of living between places. Lagos and Berlin remain recognisable, yet neither appears intact; each is altered by the presence of the other.

The work approaches migration not simply as movement from one location to another, but as an accumulation of places within memory. Urban experience becomes layered and portable, allowing multiple geographies, languages and rhythms to coexist within the same mental and sensory landscape.

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