– Listening between Lagos and Schloss Solitude, Castle Arcade, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, November 29th, 2025
Resonant Distance is a sound piece that invites listeners to experience the city of Lagos through the lens of solitude, memory, and distance. Lagos is a city defined by its sonic density, its relentless hustle and bustle, the thick weave of traffic, the street vendors’ melodic calls, the sharp punctuation of car horns, the ever-present hum of power generators, megaphones echoing across the street, and layers upon layers of music, conversations, arguments, and laughter. These sounds form a living architecture, creating a powerful sense of energy, survival, unpredictability, and life. They are not just noises; they are emotional signals, cultural codes, and memory triggers.
By contrast, Schloss Solitude exists on the opposite end of this sonic spectrum. It is surrounded by silence, calmness, long corridors of stillness, and the slow breathing rhythm of forests. The acoustic environment is soft, almost weightless; a silence so deep that it becomes its own form of sound. It was inside this quietness, far from Lagos, that I began to notice how the city continued to live inside me. How its soundscape though distant remained active in my memory. How the sounds of Lagos began to shape-shift, soften, fragment, and reassemble themselves when carried across such great geographical and emotional distances.
Resonant Distance emerges from this tension between two acoustic worlds. It is a dialogue between Lagos and Solitude, between noise and quiet, between memory and presence. The piece asks: What happens to a city’s sound when the body that once lived inside it is displaced into silence? How do distant places resonate through us, even when we are no longer physically there?
This work becomes a sonic exploration of the ways places continue to echo within us, how the memory of Lagos pulses gently beneath the silence of Schloss Solitude, how personal history reverberates inside new environments, and how sound becomes a bridge across distance. It is about listening to what remains, what transforms, and what returns to the body in unexpected ways. Through this piece, Lagos become both a memory and a presence, and Solitude becomes both a shelter and an amplifier of what has been carried across distance.
