Nneka Nnagbo | Attention Score

Nneka Nnagbo is a Nigerian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Ottawa / Odàwàng. Working across sound, film, video, text, and material forms, she creates recordings, installations, and time-based works that explore how we encounter and move through physical and digital spaces. Her practice is built around sustained attention, creating conditions for noticing, and allowing meaning to emerge through duration and presence.

The artist will be creating in DAÏMÔN‘s spaces from October 13 to 27, 2026, as part of the First Work residency program.

”My practice moves across sound, film, video, text, and material forms. I’m interested in attention and perception, particularly how we encounter the places and materials around us, and how ordinary things can become unfamiliar when we spend time with them. My work often begins with a simple gesture or observation, which I explore through repetition, duration, and experimentation.

For this residency, I’m developing Attention Score, a sound walk tracing a route from Hull to downtown Ottawa. Through field recordings made along the route, I’m exploring how we come to know a place through listening, movement, and sustained attention, and how our experience of a familiar environment changes depending on where and how we direct our attention.

The walk passes through a series of thresholds — from the interprovincial bridge connecting Gatineau and Ottawa, to the transitions between institutional and commercial spaces and domestic space, as well as the smaller shifts between streets, intersections, and moments of waiting.

Attention Score explores how everyday sound can reveal the subtle transitions that shape our experience of moving through the world.”

Nneka Nnagbo