Lost Songs of the Middle Passage by Àsìkò

Lost Songs of the Middle Passage is an act of remembrance by  Àsìkò. Curated by Femi Odunlami, Founder of Art.Africa, this thoughtfully-conceived exhibition begins in the silence of the Atlantic, where millions of African lives were lost—thrown overboard, drowned in despair, or buried within the suffocating holds of slave ships. Their voices were cut short, their songs silenced before they could echo across generations.

This body of work asks: what remains of those voices, and how do we hear them now?

Through layered images, archival fragments, and spectral presences, the project imagines the spiritual walk of those who perished. Their souls do not vanish; they gather in communion beneath the waves, drawn toward ancestral memory, toward Africa, toward a cosmic Baobab that transforms absence into presence.

The work resists history’s erasure by blending fact with the mythic. Ship diagrams, voyage records, and first-person accounts meet surreal visual language that transforms the ocean into both grave and portal. This is not only a mourning but a reckoning—an attempt to give form to the ungrievable, to return dignity where it was stolen.

The lost songs themselves are not written, nor can they be fully known. They surface here as whispers, as textures, as resonant silences. The project invites viewers to stand at the threshold between history and imagination, to listen for the songs that were interrupted, and to carry them forward as living memory.