Founded by Marta Foresti, LAGO Collective brings artists, designers, and researchers together to rethink human movement through collaboration, storytelling, and the power of imagination.
The Beauty of Movement. Photo: Derick Armah
Movement is both a physical act and a state of mind. It carries stories, ideas, and identities across borders, shaping the places where we live and the ways we imagine one another. In its third annual edition, The Beauty of Movement 2025: The Moving City invited audiences to experience this flux through the lens of architecture, art and design. Curated by LAGO Collective, the evening traced how creativity travels through people and spaces, transforming constraint into expression.
Founded by policy executive-turned-social-entrepreneur Marta Foresti, LAGO Collective bridges research, data, and creative practice to challenge the language of migration. Its projects — from All Other Passports to Stories of Visa Inequality — use design and storytelling to expose systems that limit movement while celebrating resilience and imagination.
At this year’s event, the collective presented a dynamic programme of films, performances, and conversations, from a Personal Cartography from Tehran by Pooneh Ghoddoosi to The Roots of Circularity with Yayra Agbofah and Nate Agbetu on transforming waste into beauty, to architectural dialogues and rituals with Elias and Yousef Anastas, Emilia Terragni, Giles Tettey Nartey and Nana Biamah-Ofosu, to sport with Ayo Akinwolere, natural frontiers with Farah Piriye Coene and the final Ritual of Music with Oroko Radio and Jail Time Records. Each moment formed part of a larger narrative: one in which migration is not a crisis but creativity in motion.
Emilia Terragni and Giles Tettey Nartey. Photo: Derick Armah
ART AFRICA: LAGO Collective describes itself as a “research and creative collective on movement, culture, and the arts,” with the mission to change the narrative on the global movement of people. How does this vision shape your approach to connecting art, design, and social research — and what does it mean, in practice, to reframe how movement is understood globally?
Marta Foresti: For me, this approach matters for two main reasons. First, the traditional ways of shaping narratives around migration — through research, data, and policy analysis — are no longer cutting it. After years of working in that space, I’ve seen how little of it influences the political climate or public imagination.
On the other hand, collaborating with artists, designers, musicians, poets, and makers has revealed the immense potential of creative practice to shift these conversations. Exploring new visual and sonic vocabularies allows us to focus on talent, imagination, and contribution, to frame movement as a story of creativity and exchange rather than crisis.
We deliberately create work at the intersection of research, evidence, art, and design, work that speaks to the movement of people in fresh and nuanced ways. The aim is to move away from polarised narratives that divide “migrants” and “non-migrants,” or “origins” and “destinations.” Through art and design, we can instead celebrate the complexity, colour, and beauty of human mobility.
Marta Foresti. Photo: Derick Armah
Since its inception, LAGO has cultivated collaborations across disciplines, from policy and architecture to sound and performance. How does this interdisciplinary framework shape your curatorial vision, and what challenges or possibilities does it present in practice?
This interdisciplinary framework defines both our curatorial vision and our daily practice. We co-create with artists, designers, poets, and musicians using data and evidence to generate new forms of storytelling. For example, we’ve worked with information designers to turn data on visa inequality into striking visualisations and sound pieces. We’ve also co-produced documentaries that bring together the voices of city leaders and African musicians reflecting on how mobility constraints affect their work and lives.
The challenges are those that accompany any cross-disciplinary effort. Institutions, funding systems, and professional structures are still built around rigid sectors and silos. It takes persistence and imagination to work across them. Yet the possibilities far outweigh the obstacles. The responses we receive show a deep appetite for collaboration, for finding new ways to talk about global movement through creative and emotional registers, not just technical ones.
Our annual event, The Beauty of Movement, embodies this. It brings together people from diverse fields — artists, policy thinkers, designers, and researchers — who are eager to reimagine migration through shared experience and creative dialogue.
Guest at The Beauty of Movement. Photo: Derick Armah
This year’s edition of The Beauty of Movement, titled The Moving City, situates movement within the urban realm. What led you to focus on the city as both subject and metaphor, and how does it extend the trajectory of previous editions?
I’ve worked with cities for many years, and they feel central to the story of human movement. People move to cities, within them, and between them. Yet most migration discourse still centres on nation-states and borders, when in fact the real dynamics and consequences play out in urban life.
Cities absorb the realities of migration in tangible ways, through housing, transport, public space, and everyday coexistence. They also offer opportunity, as people move to cities in search of work, safety, belonging, and community. Urban spaces become microcosms of global mobility, places where cultures and imaginations meet and transform one another.
So focusing on The Moving City felt like a natural continuation of our exploration. It is in cities that the beauty of movement is most visible, in their sounds, their architecture, their rhythms, and the constant reinvention that migration brings.
Eka Ikpe, Yayra Agbofah and Marta Foresti. Photo: Derick Armah
The programme at Whitechapel Gallery unfolded as an experiential narrative, transitioning from film and dialogue to sound and ritual. What curatorial strategies guided this sequence, and how did you envision audiences engaging with it as a collective experience?
Each edition of The Beauty of Movement is guided by two curatorial principles: connection and trust. We work with people we have genuine relationships with, collaborators who share an interest in what LAGO stands for. These connections come alive through performance, conversation, and co-creation. It’s about showing, not just telling, what happens when people meet across cultural and disciplinary borders.
Trust is equally essential. Because of it, artists, architects, designers, and academics are willing to share space and experiment together. The result is a fluid, collaborative environment rather than a traditional exhibition or conference.
At Whitechapel, this approach shaped the evening’s rhythm, from the intimacy of conversation to immersive sound and film. One piece, for instance, explored the consequences of waste in Accra, Ghana; another reimagined architecture as choreography. These works created moments of collective reflection, inviting audiences to experience ideas rather than listen to them.
What moved me most was how people responded, not as spectators but as participants in a shared act of curiosity and imagination. The event fostered a real sense of community, grounded in that same trust and connection that define LAGO’s ethos.
Pooneh Ghoddoosi. Photo: Derick Armah
LAGO’s projects often operate at the intersection of cultural production and social activism. In what ways does The Beauty of Movement negotiate this relationship between aesthetics and ethics, particularly in its gestures of solidarity with creative and humanitarian initiatives?
LAGO isn’t an activist organisation in the traditional sense. Our work is rooted in knowledge and creative production, but the ethical dimension is absolutely central. LAGO was born out of concern for how the migration debate, particularly in Western countries, has eroded notions of humanity, dignity, and respect.
Our response is to propose an alternative. Instead of reproducing narratives of crisis or pity, we use creative language to restore respect for talent, contribution, and skill, to celebrate the agency of people on the move. This is an ethical action.
We move beyond what I’d call humanitarian reflexes. While compassion and solidarity are vital, they can sometimes narrow the focus to suffering alone. What’s missing in those narratives is recognition of creativity and the enrichment that mobility brings to societies. The Beauty of Movement offers a space to imagine that broader picture, one that is inspiring, not despairing, grounded in mutual respect rather than distance or pity.
So while we may not frame our work as activism, it is a deliberate act of resistance against toxic and inhumane narratives. It’s about reframing migration as a story of imagination, contribution, and shared humanity.
Yayra Agbofah and Nate Agbetu. Photo: Derick Armah
As The Beauty of Movement continues to evolve as an annual platform for exchange, how do you imagine its future iterations developing, conceptually, geographically, or within the broader ecology of cultural dialogue that LAGO fosters?
The Beauty of Movement will continue to grow, and not just because we plan it to, but because there’s such strong demand for it. When we launched three years ago, it wasn’t intended as an annual platform, but audiences insisted we keep going. There’s a real hunger for spaces that blend art, research, and global conversation in more human and joyful ways.
We’ll keep gathering once a year for the main event, but we’re also expanding. In summer 2026, we’ll host a Beauty of Movement Solstice Party, a celebration of sound, film, and community that reflects the joy behind our work. It will complement the November gathering, which remains more reflective and discursive.
London will remain an anchor for these conversations, but we’re also taking the programme elsewhere. We’ll be in Marrakesh for 1-54 in February with a project on visa inequality affecting African artists, and we’re partnering with colleagues from Accra, Nairobi, Bethlem and Johannesburg on future collaborations. Each of these encounters extends the dialogue about cultural mobility in new directions.
Ultimately, we aim to keep shaping global conversations about migration and belonging, not from the top down, but through creative exchange. The Beauty of Movement has become a meeting point for those who believe that culture can reimagine how we live together in an interconnected world. That’s what keeps it alive, and what will continue to drive it forward.
The Beauty of Movement 2025: The Moving City took place on 6 November at Whitechapel Gallery, London. For more information, visit LAGO Collective.
