Academy - Lagos

August 13 - 16, 2025

CCA Lagos, organised in collaboration with TSA Ideas Lab

This edition of The Listening Academy is titled “Go-Slow: Engaging the Imperceptible”. It presents an opportunity to explore the opposite side of Lagos’s dizzying speed and loudness, and the emphasis on hyper-activity and hyper-visuality. 

Lagos is a fast-paced, loud, vibrant and bustling city. The idea of slowness is not commonplace and often misconstrued. Moving unhurriedly or adopting slowness could be perceived as a radical act as most people and the system prioritise speed and hyper-visibility. However, like other urban spaces, Lagos is complex and filled with contrasting realities.

The phrase ‘go-slow’, typically associated with traffic jams in Lagos, will be re-appropriated to address suppressed realities in the ecosystem. Diverse social issues, notions of imperceptibility, sound’s relationship with space, how to listen to the inaudible, and Lagos’ sonic landscape will be explored through lectures, participatory and co-learning workshops, readings, sonic sessions, conversations, embodied exercises and a commissioned performance. Listening and ‘going slow’  become mechanisms of resistance to conformity and enforced expectations of living within urban cities.

Over four days, the program brings together artists, performers, researchers, curators and cultural practitioners in sessions designed as expansive spaces for deeper understanding and connecting to diverse uncommon viewpoints and ideas of communality.  

Facilitators and contributors include Brandon LaBelle, Amal Alhaag, Sami El-Enany, Wana Udobang, Peter Okotor, Amaka Obioma, Adeyosola Adeniran, Taiwo Aiyedogbon, Steffani Jemison, Ibukun Sunday, Tony Agbapuonwu, and Bukola Oyebode-Westerhuis. 

The Listening Academy Lagos program is made possible with the support of CCA Lagos, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, and Mondriaan Funds. The Listening Academy is an independent research program focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. The academy offers a generative and nurturing framework for researchers and practitioners to engage in collaborative exchange, as well as workshopping new methodologies and knowledge practices. The gathering in Lagos is part of the wider activities of The Listening Biennial’s third edition, hosted in multiple locations around the world.

TSA Ideas Lab is an independent initiative making essential art projects. Imagine it as a laboratory for stimulating hybrid artistic practices, collaborative exchanges and dialogic gatherings–even as it prioritises making art books and fostering meaningful experiences.