VISUAL ARTS
Wind power: nature’s role in moving art
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AS THEY PREPARE TO GO ON STAGE AT LAGOS’S CAVERNOUS NEW AFRIKA SHRINE, Ezra Collective say performing at Afrobeat’s musical home is “an honour even greater than [winning] the Mercury prize”. Lagos is a pulsing mass of infectious energy. Densely packed houses stretch to the horizon below a halo of pollution. The streets are busy at all hours, with people eating, drinking, talking, getting haircuts and buying and selling anything and everything. Nigeria’s biggest city is complex, diverse and unequal, but all over it, the same music vibrates: at any hour, the world-conquering sound of Afrobeat pours out of cars, bars, windows and parks.
In the northern suburb of Ikeja, tucked away amid warehouses and factories, is the home of that sound, the New Afrika Shrine. This huge auditorium, with its corrugated metal roof and walls drained of their colour by years
