Afrosonica: Soundscapes at MEG (Musée d’ethnographie de Genève) is an immersive exhibition (16 May 2025–4 January 2026) that animates a museum environment often perceived as quite aseptic and sets in motion music and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Co-curated by Madeleine Leclair (MEG’s ethnomusicology curator) and Mo Laudi (Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape), the show proposes the museum as an architecture of listening, unfolding across instruments, archival recordings, and new commissions. If Frieda Ekotto and Mo Laudi are in dialogue here, it is because their trajectories intersect in clear ways. Switzerland is a shared ground, through MEG and through Frieda’s formation and outlook. Africa and its diasporic circulations are central to both, linking Globalisto’s practice of hospitality, sound and social mapping with Frieda’s work on language, narrative and Black subjectivities. The third link is Koyo Kouoh, a shared touchstone: a childhood friend of Frida, and a reference and colleague for Mo Laudi; Frieda knew her in Switzerland, Bopape knew her while she was at Zeitz MOCAA, situated in South Africa, Bopape’s country of birth, with their paths crossing from 2019 to 2025 during her directorship of the museum. From Paris, where Mo Laudi is based and from Abidjan, in the wake of FANON antinomies (the exhibition running at SOMETHING art space for which Frieda Ekotto was invited to contribute as a Fanon expert), the conversation that follows addresses diasporic voices, cultural circulation, decolonial perspectives, language and narrative, radical hospitality, sonic cartography, DJing as curatorial montage, the dance floor as pedagogy, living archives, and the museum to come. It frames listening as infrastructure and restitution as a practice of relation, opening a rigorous yet hospitable exchange.
Frieda Ekotto
Dear Mo Laudi, thanks for your precious time. I’m very interested in your concept of Globalisto, specifically diasporic voices, cultural circulation, decolonial perspectives, language, and narrative. Being here in Abidjan with Alex with her wonderful exhibit of “Frantz Fanon: Antinomies”, we spoke a lot about diasporic voices, decolonial perspectives, language, etc, I think Blackness and “Globalisto” is shaping up many of our being in the world today. I would like to explore with you how music, sound, and hospitality can transform our understanding of the museum and diasporic memory. Can you briefly introduce Afrosonica : Soundscapes and the philosophy of Globalisto. Before diving into other questions, I would like to start with the work of our late sister Koyo Kouoh in South Africa. Your Globalisto philosophy is dedicated to circulating diasporic voices and narratives. Koyo Kouoh, through her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, has left a mark on Africa and the global curatorial scene. What aspects of her legacy directly inform your work today? And how do you envision a museum like Zeitz MOCAA resonating with your own practices of radical hospitality and sonic cartography?
Mo Laudi
Thank you for your generous note. It is moving to hear from you in Abidjan with Alix Koffi around FANON antinomies. Fanon’s tension, doubleness and refusal sit at the heart of my practice: how sound, language and welcome can hold contradictions and still move us forward. Our late sister Koyo Kouoh remains a compass. May she rest in peace. Her passing was felt across continents and her work still drives us. RAW Material made me feel at home from my first visit, and RAW Académie set a model for situated learning. At Zeitz MOCAA she showed that scale can keep nuance. “When We See Us” set a benchmark for Pan-African curating grounded in Black joy, self-representation and long-form research. Koyo fused rigour with care and demanded scholarship accountable to the public. She treated the museum as a school where audiences are co-thinkers. She built translocal Pan-African networks and insisted on plurality in linguistic, geographic and epistemic terms, with an ethic of credit. These lessons guide my daily work: research that listens, programs that travel across communities, labels and budgets that honour the full ecology of making, and governance that widens who decides and who benefits. Globalisto continues pathways she opened. What guides me now is the courage to curate discursively inside exhibitions, the sense that continental and diasporic trajectories share one weather system, and care as infrastructure. Hospitality is the backbone, not an afterthought. A museum like Zeitz MOCAA aligns with my practices of radical hospitality and sonic cartography when listening remaps circulation. The foyer becomes a true threshold, galleries are tuned as rooms for resonance, and archives open as studios for remix and study. The traveling life of “When We See Us,” from Cape Town to Basel and Brussels, already enacts this circulation.
Frieda Ekotto
Can you briefly introduce Afrosonica : Soundscapes and the philosophy of Globalisto?
Mo Laudi
“Afrosonica: Soundscapes” is the first exhibition in a Swiss museum dedicated to African music and sound. Co-curated with Madeleine Leclair at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, it turns the museum into a listening architecture, part exhibition and part instrument. Field recordings, praise songs, instrument archives, machines and sound installations create spaces for exchange. The project proposes the museum as a resonant chamber for diasporic memory, where knowledge moves through rhythm, vibration and shared presence. It is pedagogy in surround sound, with stems to borrow, playlist relays that extend into the city and talks that unfold like rehearsals. It is a team effort and I thank the museum for the vision. I coined “Afrosonica” by merging the Afro and the Sonica, imagining a timeless destination. At its core, Afrosonica listens as method and maps by assembling a constellation of artists, including Tarek Atoui, Sammy Baloji and David Nadeau-Bernatchez, Sonia Boyce and Ain Bailey, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Ahmed Essyad, KMRU, Yara Mekawei, Midori Takada, Elsa M’Bala, Evita Koné, Binetou Sylla, Nicolas Repac, Reda Sayagh, Laëtycia Vumuka, Trinity Mesimé Njume-Ebong, Hamadoun Kassogué, Mansara and Amaury Voslion, Penny Siopis, Jürgen Schadeberg, Luca Mazzaferri, aja monet, Rohan Ayinde, Bocar Niang, DJ Lynnée Denise and myself. Their works traverse ports, sacred sites, markets and dance floors. They treat sound as geography and archive, tracing how people carry places inside their voices and gestures. Poets and scholars extend this dialogue, turning the exhibition into a study in rhythm, language and memory. Through the Imbizo, grounded in Globalisto, Afrosonica invites audiences in as participants rather than spectators and prefers study to spectacle. Voices in French, English, Arabic, Wolof and isiZulu form a polyphony. A bilingual catalogue and a companion record produced with FLEE, featuring Satch Hoyt, Pascale Obolo, Niamké Désiré (Aho Ssan), Isabel Garcia Gomez, Joseph Kamaru (KMRU), Uhuru Phalafala and others, carries the work beyond the gallery.
Frieda Ekotto
How has your experience as a DJ shaped your curatorial and museum practice? Can mixing be thought of as a form of curatorial montage, reconfiguring archives and diasporic narratives?
Mo Laudi
Arthur Jafa once said that Duchamp is a kind of DJ who remixes objects. I met Arthur in 2010 when he directed a music video for us while I was DJing and performing with my band The Very Best. His way of editing sound and image taught me that montage can be a philosophy. I curate much like I DJ, by listening to the social field. Reading the room means reckoning with the social contracts that determine who is visible, how people move and where they can rest. I pace exhibitions to counter those scripts, seeking clear sightlines, porous thresholds, quiet refuges and spaces where people can gather without surveillance, so the experience can listen back. Crate-digging taught me where archives live: bootlegs, flyers, pirate radio, family tapes and street knowledge. Bringing these into relation with official holdings is not garnish. It is reordering and empowering. Sampling ethics guide the method. Credit lineages, clear rights, pay contributors and surface the labour behind the beat. Sequencing is my narrative tool. Like a set, each exhibition warms up, lifts, peaks, breaks and releases. Meaning happens in the overlap, the crossfade, when two works share air and generate a third sense. Mixing is curatorial montage. It cuts and joins sense to rehouse scattered fragments in live relation, so diasporic narratives travel by routes rather than roots. The museum becomes a sound system for collective study.
Fin de l'extrait.