Echoes on the Surface: DJ-Led Storytelling and Citizen Science at the London Design Biennale 2025
Dana Sousa-Limbu
A day of listening, memory, and movement with Dana Sousa-Limbu of DIVINE KIND at the London Design Biennale 2025
It was mid-morning when I arrived at Somerset House, laptop wires coiled, voice recordings at the ready, DJ controller in my bag. The courtyard was already humming with activity: visitors drifting in, conversations bouncing off the stone, and flags announcing the London Design Biennale had arrived for June 2025 rustling in the breeze. It felt both monumental and intimate, the kind of place where ideas might echo long after the crowds have gone.
I was here to perform Echoes on the Surface, a live, DJ-facilitated sonic piece created as part of the London Design Biennale 2025, hosted in the pavilion presented by the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. As a DJ-researcher working under the name DIVINE KIND, I wanted to bring something to this space that asked people not just to hear, but to listen. To stories. To each other. To the city.
The performance unfolded in layers of voice, texture, beat. At the heart of it were recordings gathered by Citizen Scientist Twinkle Jayakumar, who had embedded herself in communities across London, listening deeply to people’s experiences of regeneration, precarious housing, displacement, and care. These weren’t anonymous interview clips but acts of trust and of testimony.
The UCL Institute for Global Prosperity’s Citizen Science Academy played a vital role in making this possible. By training and supporting local researchers like Twinkle, they create the conditions for people to become experts in their own experience. Echoes on the Surface tried to honour that by creating space where those voices could resonate, all set to a soundscape co-produced with my brother, Aaron Sousa-Limbu.
Throughout the day, people stepped into the performance space tentatively, and then stayed. Some sat and some stood, but I watched strangers become still together. That stillness, I’ve come to realise, is part of the politics of listening. It’s an act of presence and of understanding how we’re all implicated by urban challenges despite the distance we try to place between ourselves and harsh realities.
For me, DJing is research. Personally, it’s how I pay attention, make sense, connect various life experiences. I’ve always been drawn to what happens in the in-between spaces: between track and story, beat and breath. In this piece, I was asking: how can sound be a form of social evidence? How can it hold memory, tension, resistance, and still move us?
A woman came up to me after the set and said: “It felt like the stories were circling me. I didn’t expect to feel that much.” That stayed with me and helped me understand that Echoes on the Surface was not just about performance as spectacle, but performance as witnessing.
As the afternoon light shifted across the courtyard, I was reminded how space shapes listening. Somerset House, with all its architectural gravitas, offered contrast to the intimacy of the stories. However, the tension worked, animated by the sound interacting with the pillars in the room that asked ‘What does the “good life” mean to you?’
Later in the day, I took time to walk around and listen to the other installations. I thought about the Biennale’s theme of ‘Surface Reflections’, curated by Dr Samuel Ross MBE, and how much of our understanding of the city depends on what we’re willing to look beneath. Sound, to me, is one way in as it slips past defences and gets under the surface of human experiences.
This performance built on questions I’ve been exploring in my ongoing INTERCONNECTED narrated music series published to Mixcloud, where I use sound to trace links between identity, displacement, memory, and care. Those monthly mixes have become a quiet space for reflection and resistance. I see them as extensions of the same practice: mapping emotion and place through rhythm, voice and intuition. Looking ahead, I’ll be continuing this work in collaboration with artists, researchers and community organisers, deepening my inquiry into sound, storytelling and care in the city.
I’m grateful to Eva Lamorgese, who helped bring this community-led research to life through performance, and to Zulum Elumogo, whose curatorial insight connected the piece to the broader civic futures imagined at the Biennale.
And of course, to everyone who came, listened, stayed—even briefly. Echoes on the Surface was a reminder that sound doesn’t just fill space. It holds it, shapes it and, sometimes, changes it.