Sonic Rest Architectonics
Tomi Laja (b. Ibadan) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and writer whose training began with the study and practice of architecture. Her independent practice prioritizes poetics, process, and critical thought to explore themes of form, agency, and sensuality. Her current research holds a special interest in abstraction. She develops sculptures, essays, and drawings, and works on personal and commissioned assignments worldwide.
Previously, she has worked with SOM, The Graham Foundation, Studio Sung Tieu, The Funambulist, Park Books, Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, and Political Economy, and was the Guest Editor of the third issue of DISC: Media, Technology, and Environments, amongst others. She has given lectures at Museum of Art and Cultural History Dortmund and Bard College. Her writing has been published and presented by The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, MIT Press, PIN—UP, HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), and the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, amongst others.
Awards include a Fulbright Germany grant for independent research (2023-24) and a fellowship with Design Akademie Saaleck, dieDAS (2024). She has been invited to art and writing residencies at Luminary Arts and High Desert Test Sites by Andrea Zittel. A guest in Fine Art at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, she holds degrees in architecture from Harvard University and Iowa State University of Science and Technology.
SONIC REST ARCHITECTONICS is an ongoing research-based visual art series. Concerned with ecological and social exhaustion, the project forms works through the sculptural media of stone, sound, and text. Interested in ideas on psychological, haptic, and social weather, the collection of spatial poems yearns toward micro-climates for collective rest, where connectivity can be softly held.
Intimate yet opaque, minimal and dense, the proposal pairs Soundbather, a stone sculpture, and Deep in the Woods, a sound art piece. Both spatial works were conceived through research, deep listening, and study of the wet forest. Deep in the Woods is a multi-channel spatial sound art written by Tomi and produced with Barédu Ahmed. Geometric, abstract, earthy, and unsettled — the work forms a three-part, 30-minute composition in which sound is not fixed but instead produces a continuously shifting micro-climate towards rest. The work builds on Bernhard Leitner's ideas on "corporal hearing," which positions sound as experienced through the entire body rather than solely the ear, and is influenced by Stephanie M. Camp's essay, "The Intoxication of Pleasurable Amusement," which serves as a conceptual scaffold for the artistic research.
Visually grounded with the carved marble form, Soundbather, the pair are imagined as environmental fragments that are at once immersive and minimal, introspective and collective, inviting moments towards subtle shifts in perception and an awareness of shared presence.
I embrace sound and noise as an invisible, yet felt, sculptural medium, continually reflecting on the relationship between the body, landscape, and constructed environments. The cool materiality of stone requires an intimate, present, and collaborative connection with time, ecology, and rest. The stone and sound processes have become a form of mediation, an embodied method and space to process quiet histories and reorient toward new visions.