Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City
An exhibition project by Goethe-Institut Nigeria
Curated by Chinyere Obieze in collaboration with Orinayo Odubawo
Venue: Center for Contemporary Art CCA Lagos, 9 McEwen Street Yaba, Lagos
Dates: Friday February 13th, 2026 – Thursday April 30th, 2026
Opening Days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Time: 10am – 6pm daily
What drives our city?
How would you rethink and redesign our city?
Over the last years, the transactional dynamics of cities towards excess profit and increased speed, together with the adoption of global ideas upon local culture have been theorized, staged and debated within independent art and research projects but also within major art events such as the Lagos Biennial. It is with this in mind that the 2025/2026 edition of Dreaming New Worlds – a project by Goethe-Institut Nigeria, curated by Obieze Chinyere in collaboration with Orinayo Odubawo, asked women art collectives to critique, appreciate and present their ideals towards urban planning.
The result was an inquiry into the body as a starting point through which the city’s structures, behaviours and activities are acted out – acknowledging that bodies are differently policed, exhausted, racialized, disabled, and gendered within rigid urban systems, in Nigeria as elsewhere.
This immersive show manifests the 2025/2026 collective’s aspirations toward solution-oriented, embodied design thinking over techno-utopian spectacle. Here, the city is understood as a lived, sensory, and social experience shaped through movement, breath, memory, and care.
Space, in this exhibition, is not empty. It is a social and sensorial construct formed through perception, access, and behavior.
Sarauniya Ènè
The Lagos-based, women-led collective Sarauniya Ènè works across architecture, design, archeology and olfactory practice. They draw from African matriarchal systems, oral histories, and pull contested narratives of women and women’s legacies to present their relevance and tensions for now and the future. In their installation, the collective interrogates memory and spatial justice through an adventurous radical sensory experience.
Their installation is inspired by the legacy of the contested historical figure: Queen Amina of Zaria. She is a warrior ruler whose existence remains debated even among her own people. Queen Amina is said to have ruled and expanded the city of Zaria from 1576 to 1610 through military expansion. With material evidence of her empire surviving primarily through nonfunctioning gates that dot the city of Zaria, and Erabor Emokpae’s epic painting, Queen Amina of Zaria (1976), her symbolic presence has endured in contemporary cultural memory solely for her achievement of imperial conquest as a woman.
Sarauniya Ènè offers a probe to how such a queen would be erased in her own land, what the realities of her rule and benefits were, and if it can inspire city building today. Rather than monumentalizing power, the collective proposes that true legacy resides in embodied joys, shared imagination, and intergenerational values of residents. Their installation translates this idea into an olfactory landscape, charting their utopic city through scent.
Visitors encounter Taruwa City, a mythic urban vision shaped by their community-submitted dreams of an ideal city. The city overarchingly carries notes of ozone, mint, citrus, and warm woods, layered with subtle cracks of newly minted technology. Markets release the smell of spices and herbs. Earthy notes root the city in stability, while milk, coffee, and cinnamon evoke human closeness, and at the edges linger leather and cardamom, reminders that history and struggle are never erased.
Through olfactory art, Sarauniya Ènè proposes a different kind of living monument. The smell reminds the visitor that they belong to a space, and not just any space, but their city built in collaboration with the visitor’s memories.
Sarauniya Ènè is made up of
- Stephanie Isah, a Lagos-based olfactory artist, researcher and poet
- Odum Rita, a Lagos-born designer
- Vetum Gima Galadima, an archaeologist, curator and artist from Kaduna
- Joy Sunday George, a 3D artist
MatriAér Lab
MatriAér Lab is a multidisciplinary collective exploring women-centered visions of future living. The collective brings together practitioners in architecture, horticulture, sound design, and digital art to create immersive spatial environments.
Their project, The Breathing City, imagines an urban system designed according to the tempo of the breath. Here, architecture, traffic, labor, and domestic life move rhythmically; and the city is envisioned as an interconnected body linked through shared gait and sound.
They make use of the kitchen and the community center as the space from which to understand and regulate this tempo. Additionally, wet-adapted plant systems in their installation reference Lagos as a coastal city, and the capacity for the cycles of plants and water to remind the visitor of how urban design can coexist with water bodies promoting ecological preservation.
The main thesis of this collective is that by prioritizing breath in shaping the city, design can be inspired to better serve the people. There is an embodied knowing of the tempo to space in the city from which structure that maximizes collective good can be created.
Sculpture, animation, and sound bring this environment to life, blurring the physical and digital space, to propose that community, ecological intelligence, and emotional well-being are infrastructural principles, not luxuries.
MatriAér Lab is made up of
- Fiyin Koko, Lagos-based multidisciplinary artist
- Xela, Lagos-based artist
- Quadri Sorunke, Lagos-based architect
- Fxrhino, sound designer
- Monai McCullough, ecological researcher and horticulturalist
- Zida Kalu, artist and project manager
Exhibition Programme
March
Friday 6th March 2026 -12pm: Lagos Gallery Weekend: Curatorial Walkthrough
Saturday 7th March 2026 – 2pm: Lagos Gallery Weekend: Performance Presentation, and Generative Letter Writing workshop
Saturday 14th March 2026 – 2pm: MatriAér Lab Artist Talk
Saturday 21st March 2026 – 2pm: Scent Workshop by Sarauniya Ènè
Friday 27th March 2026 – 5pm: Film Screening: Sita-Bella, The First, 2023
April
Saturday 11th April 2026 – 2pm : Sarauniya Ènè Artists Talk
Saturday 18th April 2026 – 2pm: Workshop by MatriAér Lab
Friday 24th April 2026 – 5pm: Closing Party – Re Screening of Sita-Bella, The First, 2023 // Women in Architecture and 7pm: Make your own scent party – Music Policy: We are all Chemicals
Credits
Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City is an exhibition project by Goethe-Institut Nigeria as a part of Dreaming New Worlds.
Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City is curated by Chinyere Obieze in collaboration with Orinayo Odubawo
Exhibition Design: Federico Martelli
Exhibition Production: A Whitespace Creative Agency
Production Lead: Abigail Iyowuna
Partners: CCA Lagos, Lagos Urban Development Initiative LUDI, Abela Olfactory Art Center, and A Whitespace Creative Agency
