Music licensing company, PPL PRS, supports the sounds of ‘Earth, Memory, and the Spaces We Inhabit’ exhibition

The sounds that accompanied the exhibition included three unique and immersive soundscapes that represented the exhibition’s central themes of Sustenance, Leisure, and Ecology.

For visitors to the exhibition, these soundscapes acted as a sensorial portal, weaving together sonic textures, archival fragments, field recordings, and experimental compositions to evoke the spatial memories and matrilineal traditions.

Created in collaboration with practitioners who work at the intersection of sonic ecology and sound engineering, the soundscape gave audiences an auditory journey that highlighted the often-unheard frequencies of Black womanhood and space-making.

This also included a specially commissioned piece of music created by electronic and African dance artist THE MASKED DJ (TMSKDJ).  The song entitled, There Was Chorus Before Concrete is made up of recordings of soundbites created by African women in urban life and was used to add a contemporary rhythm to the ancestral and ecological soundscape.

Alongside the immersive sounds, the exhibition also focused on boldly challenging traditional ideas of architecture to reshape the spaces we live in and how memory, care, and generational knowledge can be used as transformative forces in rethinking our environments.

Rooted in the Sankofa principle—the act of retrieving wisdom from the past to build the future—Black Females in Architecture redefines architecture as an embodied practice of listening, remembering, and imagining new worlds.