Echoes of Accra

Research, Exhibition and Publication. Funded by the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship and Arts Council England.

In collaboration with Matthew Eberhard, Lucy Paton and Anthony Staples.

London is facing increasing pressure from a changing and globalising world, our communities struggling to accommodate the flux associated with population growth, migration and economic uncertainty. Yet as a society we continue to view the Western city as the model of development – at the forefront of modernisation and progress.

In March 2016 we travelled to Accra in Ghana, looking to this rapidly growing African city for an ex-centric study of contemporary responses to 21st century pressures.

We set out to investigate an alternative and exploratory means of recording our cities, one that didn’t merely employ the conventional tools of the architecture field trip - images and drawings.

Armed with a sound recorder and open ears, we focussed on the people of Accra, the characters we met and the conversations we had, studying the city guided through the lived experiences of its communities.

You can listen to the stories we collected here.

On our return to London we put together an exhibition presenting a collection of personal stories from across Ghana’s capital, which heard together, tell broader narratives about the city, its diverse and distinct communities and idiosyncratic inhabitants.

Using interviews, sound, imagery, drawings and ephemera we presented a series of part real, part imagined walks through the city.