Artist, Emeka Ogboh: My name is Emeka Ogboh. I'm a Nigerian artist and my work incorporates the five human senses. You are experiencing Lagos State of Mind III. This is an 18-channel audio and sculptural installation.
This piece sort of summarizes my expatriate experience living in Berlin. I fused these two cities because, at some point, I think the lines were blurred. Like, how are you a Berliner and how are you a Lagosian?
I wanted to create a piece that had elements of two cities. But I didn't want a situation where I separated the two completely to say, this is Berlin and this is Lagos. I was more interested in placing them together and finding the intersecting points, the fusion of these two cities. How could I do that?
That is when I tapped into my imagination. I realized there is actually no Lagosstrasse in Berlin. That does not exist, but that means “Lagos Street.” And I decided to create that, using the way the street signs are designed in Berlin, and also the name of streets, strasse. So Lagosstrasse was one of the first elements that came into my head to design.
From there, I was looking for sounds that would place me in these two different places. It has sounds recorded both in Lagos, Nigeria and Berlin, Germany. You're going to hear the sound of automated voices calling out train stops in Berlin, the sound of Lagos bus stations, the sound of Lagos bus conductors.
I recorded a lot of the transportation modes because I, figured out that this is where you can hear so many layers of sound and different languages.
In Berlin, the train stations, they are mostly automated voices, which is not what happens in Lagos. You know, Lagos is more like the bus conductors doing it in real time, and I decided that the best way will be to blend almost like a call and response situation, where the Berlin automated voice announces, the Lagos replies, or vice versa, or sometimes not.
So this piece is actually an imagined and a realistic piece.