LAGO Collective

What makes a space a cultural space? The designation? The architecture? Or the quality of encounter it makes possible? Some of the most interesting cultural infrastructure of our time often doesn't call itself a museum and carries none of the political capital that comes with it. Carparks, courtyards, playgrounds, airports, museum foyers re-imagined 🔄 ✨️

Kenji Maghoma has written a new piece for The Beauty of Movement Substack on cultural infrastructure beyond museum walls and why other containers of creative work matter for policy and the creative economy. 🧱🌱 Link in bio! 💌

Photo / Video credits: 

Bold Tendencies - photo by Peter Landers
Alserkal Avenue - photo by Alserkal Avenue 
BEAM, CORBEL, RIBS, Stone matters fragments by AAU Anastas, with Karim Kattan and Aho Ssan - photo by Kenji Maghoma
DJ Raff at the Barbican for anyone can dance w/Love in the Endz - video by Marta Foresti

Visiting the UK? It depends on your passport 🛂

How can you have an equal partnership with a country whose citizens you turn away four times out of ten for a holiday or a business meeting? ⛔️

The UK visa regime is deeply unequal: in 2025 rejection rates for business and visitors varied between 5% and 50% depending on the country of application.

These rejections have a very high price tag 💰. The total cost of rejections rose from 44.7 million in 2023, £50.7 million in 2024 to £58.5 million in 2025, largely due to the government raising fees.

The costs are not just financial and they affect the UK too: trade is limited, hotel rooms remain empty and conferences are cancelled.

It is a unnecessary loss for all involved, time to fix it!

How costs are calculated: the number of rejected applications multiplied by the visa fee (£127 in 2025, £115 in 2024, £100 in 2023), which is non-refundable regardless of outcome.

Data sourced from official UK Home Office immigration statistics.

Data Analysis by LAGO Collective with Verdiana Pasqualini. link in bio and stories

NZƏNDA, The Path Home 🇨🇲

ON opening day at the Cameroonian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale something came together that felt less like an event and more like a gathering. A conversation about sound, home and what creative practice carries across borders.

A performance that created the most beautiful stillness. And a sonic journey around the
world that none of us were quite ready to leave.

This is the Venice that happens outside the Giardini. Built not on institutional infrastructure but on collective spirit, creative determination and the kind of community
that finds each other across continents and shows up.
Koyo Kouoh named this Biennale In Minor Keys. We heard that everywhere on the Cameroon Pavilion’s opening day: in the conversations, in the music, in the silences
between. Not the loudest or biggest room. But perhaps the most alive.

Thank you to , .diop .michael.gabriel_studio .adorno and the team Kenji Maghoma, and

📸 and ._foresti

📣 Why are we in Venice? 

Art and culture are not peripheral to geopolitics. The politics of the Venice Biennale and the controversy around who gets to participate makes that clear. We believe the answer is to show up, listen and contribute. 

On 8th May, join us at the , The Path Home, for a conversation on sound and movement with .diop [RSVP details below]

This year's Biennale was conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh under the theme In Minor Keys. In her curatorial statement Koyo states that In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have built universes of imagination. We are here, sotto voce, and we carry what we encounter back into our own work.

Venice unfolds across its sestieri, at different volumes. This year, some of the most compelling work is happening in the city's fabric itself: schools (Sierra Leone and DRC), shipyards (Iceland) and churches (Estonia and South Africa). And so many others. Perspective matters. If you only view from one centre, everything else looks like the periphery.

We are here to move.

Friday 8th May, 4.30 PM
Gervasuti Foundation, Palazzo Canova Cannaregio, 4991 - 4998 - 5001/a, 30121 Venice [RSVP] [email protected] | www.nzenda.com

Photo credits: 

(1) Camila Gutierrez
(2) Ama Minori
(3) Dimitar Karanikolov
(4) Tichr

The sounds we come from, where sound arrives  
Join us for the opening of the Cameroon Pavillion, NZƏNDA - The Path Home

🗓 Friday 8th May, 4.30 
Conversation followed by a party with a DJ set from Steve Happi 

✉️ Gervasuti Foundation, Palazzo Canova Cannaregio, 4991 - 4998 - 5001/a, 30121 Venice 

[RSVP] [email protected] | www.nzenda.com

A collaboration between  and featuring 
.diop ._foresti and Kenji Maghoma

Are you following us on Substack? 📖

lately we've been writing on labels, tariffs, wisdom, on conversation and on why the beauty of movement matters.

If any of that sounds like your kind of reading, the link is in our bio. Subscribe and tell us what you think.

What should we write about next? comment below ↓

Today is international dance day. 

We're inspired by Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, which opens with the stage covered in soil. Tonnes of earth under dancers' feet.  

In 2020, the piece was restaged with dancers from 14 African countries. The same choreography, telling a timeless story that lands importantly now at a time when the question of who gets to move and where, has never been more urgent. 

The story of migration and the story of movement are the same story. Dance lets us perform it in a way that evidence alone cannot. It breaks down borders between performer and audience, between the stage and the body, between the personal and the political. 

This is the beauty of movement, it cannot be contained. 

 

Credits: 

The Rite of Spring, PinaBauschFoundation 
Doppelabend Fruehlingsopfer MaartenVandenAbeele  

On Dance - The Beauty of Movement Substack, Marta Foresti

‘Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer ‘ - Barbican Art Gallery, London – 2020 

‘Faster than light’, .cabinet ,   

‘Flight Patterns’ - Crystal Pite and the , London 2025 

Martha Graham (1894-1991) 

Dora Maar - Tate Modern, London 2020

The camping tent - design for many purposes ⛺

We are just back from Milan Design Week. In between the spectacular and BIG installations, activations and brands gatherings, we fell in love with this small, literally, and quite beautiful show. ‘

‘The camping tent’ by .typologie, with supported by on the tent as a design object, and as an act of escape and exploration.

‘The tent is a ubiquitous typology whose apparent simplicity is deceptive. Halfway between architecture and furniture, the tent covers a wide range of uses and brings together heterogeneous realities. Reminiscent of primitive huts, descended from military encampments, shelter for leisure or refuge, precarious yet resistant, protective yet porous, tents are used in both particular and extreme environments”

Tents are by definition, on the move They are movement. What captured my imagination is how tents are often associated with refugee camps, temporary shelters for the displaced, but more rarely aknowldged as an object, an instrument that makes moving possible and beautiful.

This is why we love design at LAGO - it is practical and aesthetic in equal measure. It makes change, and movement, possible.

At LAGO, we do things differently 🎯

Changing the narrative on the global movement of people takes researchers and artists being in the same room. It needs data that moves people and asks for partners who are willing to try something that hasn't been done before. 

From visa inequality to circularity, music to sport, we're constantly experimenting, always in collaboration with people we trust and ideas worth taking a risk on. 

The global movement of people deserves nothing less, in this moment and in every moment. 

What's one thing you wish more people understood about human movement? Share it in the comments, we’re listening 💬 💕

The LAGO logo is designed by and Alex Piacentini [] in collaboration with Marta Foresti.