A Score For Atat’s Homestead

In A Score for Atat’s Homestead, AYO explores how sound can carry and evoke memories. The work moves between different languages, places, and memories: between the English she learned in school and Leb-Lango, her native language; between life in the city and her grandparents’ family homestead in northern Uganda; and between Uganda and the Netherlands. The installation consists of sculptural elements, field recordings, and a spatial sound composition, which together form a landscape of resonances.

Drawing from these different worlds, AYO explores what is lost when memories must be translated into a single standardized language. Her installation, which she also approaches as a “sound sculpture,” seeks to evoke her memories of her grandparents’ homestead through sound, rhythm, and resonance. Sound thus becomes a means of conveying experiences that cannot be fully captured in words.

This material quality of sound also takes shape in her glass-blown sculptures, based on the Abu, a traditional Luo wind instrument originally made from gourds and beeswax. By translating the instrument into glass, AYO brings intangible memories, language, and sound together in a tangible form.