Chord
Notes.

What would Nigerian cities look like if the body, not capital, were the primary unit of design? That was the question at the centre of Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City, the 2025/2026 edition of Goethe-Institut Nigeria's Dreaming New Worlds programme, curated by Chinyere Obieze in collaboration with Orinayo Odubawo.

Two Lagos-based collectives offered their answers. Sarauniya Ènè built an olfactory and material investigation of belonging, drawing on the contested legacy of Queen Amina of Zaria to argue that cities are constructed as much from collective memory and shared values as from concrete. MatriAér Lab proposed a city organised to the tempo of the breath, architecture, public infrastructure, and domestic life flowing with the rhythm of the human body rather than the logic of extraction.

A Whitespace Creative Arts (AWCA) Foundation came on as exhibition producer, responsible for bringing both installations to life at CCA Lagos. The work began months before the opening: from a January WIP session where our team gave the collectives production feedback on their proposals, to co-facilitating the Exhibition Design Workshop in February with internationally recognised designer Federico Martelli.

At a moment when Nigerian cities are expanding faster than the frameworks meant to govern them, Chord Notes made a case that the people most affected by urban design, bodies that are gendered, exhausted, differently abled, differently resourced, should be at the centre of how we imagine what comes next. It didn't offer blueprints so much as a different set of questions, and perhaps that is the more lasting contribution.

Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City is part of Dreaming New Worlds, an ongoing Goethe-Institut Nigeria programme committed to the intersection of science, art, and contemporary Nigerian life, supporting experimental practice and multidisciplinary collaboration as tools for reimagining our social, ecological, and urban futures.