Lanre Balogun

I have been turned away from rooms I was supposed to be in.

I have watched others walk straight through doors that took me years to find.

That gap, between who a space says it is for and who actually gets inside, is where most of my work lives.

My name is Lanre Balogun.
I am a researcher and writer based between Lagos and Amsterdam.

Lanre Balogun

Researcher & Writer

I grew up in Lagos and ended up in Amsterdam. Both cities have the same habit of making some people feel entirely at home and others feel like they are perpetually at the wrong entrance. That observation became a preoccupation. The preoccupation became research. The research kept sneaking into my writing. The two have not been fully separable since.

The work has taken me from Amsterdam's cultural institutions to a candomblé courtyard in Salvador, from nightlife door policies to questions of ableism in public space, and what happens when private equity buys a queer festival. The thread is always the same question: who bears the cost, and who captures the value.

I write for the Prince Claus Fund, MAXIVIVE, Gayasszine, and The Republic NG. I research, consult, and end up on panels. I also host Èkó Electro, a radio show where a track by Fela Kuti or Biggie becomes the entry point into a conversation about degrowth, decolonisation, or the politics of billionaires.

I am also developing Èkó Alara, a community radio and kitchen space in Lagos. If this interests you, get in touch.

─────────────────────────

If something here feels like a conversation worth having, please reach out lanrebee@protonmail.com or fill out the form below.

I keep arriving at the same scene. A space that presents itself as open: a museum, a festival, a nightclub, a funding call, a city, a religion, a body; and the quieter, more uncomfortable reality of who actually gets to be inside it.

That gap is where my research lives. It shows up in policy documents, in funding decisions, in who gets let in and who gets turned away. It is not abstract. It has names.

My tools are mostly qualitative: interviews, document analysis, contextual observation, and the personal essay, which I have come to think of as research that refuses to pretend the researcher is not in the room. Where the question demands it, I will reach for GIS, data visualisation, or even stretch myself into some spicy statistical analysis. Either way I am looking for the same thing: the place where the official story and the lived one stop matching.

─────────────────────────

research

Amsterdam presents itself as a city of culture. This research asked who that culture is actually for. Using qualitative interviews and document analysis, it examined how institutional rent-seeking behaviour widens the gap between physical proximity to cultural spaces and actual access to them, and how that gap reproduces inequality along lines of class, race, language, and network.

─────────────────────────

The pieces below share the same underlying preoccupation of who bears the cost of a system, and who captures its value, but are expressed across different contexts. Some are being converted into publishable articles.

Informality, livelihood adaptation, and vulnerability in a marginalised Lagos water settlement. Used a power-sensitive resilience framework to examine how a community navigates structural constraints that formal planning refuses to acknowledge.

Transnational analysis of the donkey hide gelatin trade between China and select African states. Whose beauty industry, whose wildlife, whose supply chain, and who is left with the environmental and socioeconomic cost. Approached through social practice theory, which asks not just what people do but what systems make certain practices feel normal, inevitable, or invisible.

Extensive literature review on degrowth and post-growth economics, critically examining the assumption of infinite growth and its consequences for resource extraction, biodiversity, and who gets to define what an economy is for.

This research is alive. It moves into essays, public dialogue, and commissioned work... and keeps returning with new questions.

Some of this is personal essay, the subjects are scattered and the pieces do not look like each other. A candomblé courtyard, a birthday party, a fist, a Pan-African rockstar.

The subject changes. The underlying question does not: who is this for, and what does it cost to belong here.

─────────────────────────

A trip to Brazil did not teach me that Yoruba indigenous religions are beautiful. It showed me that their beauty had been systematically obscured. An essay on candomblé, colonial theology, and what it means to encounter your own ancestry as something you were trained to fear.

Available on request; 2026 - 2nd print issue titled “Nigeria in the World”. Online version forthcoming.

A conversation with Lady Donli, 2024 Prince Claus Seed Awardee, on cultural identity, Pan-Africanism as a political claim rather than a branding choice, and what it takes to build sustainable infrastructure for women behind the stage in the Nigerian music industry.

On memory, desire, and the labour of holding two times at once. Working through Roland Barthes and a birthday party in Ipaja, Lagos that happened thirty years ago and refuses to stay there.

Available on request.

On the body, bottoming, and the gap between curiosity and follow-through. A piece about queer intimacy, communal preparation, and what a lazy experimentalist discovers about themselves when they finally commit to the experiment.

Available on request.

My looser writing, earlier drafts, and work still finding its form. Published under the name dodo.

─────────────────────────

If you are working on something that needs this kind of writing: an essay, an interview, a piece of research that needs to travel beyond the institution it came from, Get in touch.

Research that never leaves the page is not finished. I have never been comfortable leaving my work inside the institution that produced it.

My work travels into radio, live conversation, panels, and the dancefloor.

─────────────────────────

A 60-minute live show where a track by Fela Kuti, Biggie, or Chris Korda becomes a possible entry point into a conversation about how the world is organised and who it is organised for. Each episode pairs a guest from the arts or sciences with a piece of music that neither of them chose for its comfort. The name holds two things at once: Èkó, the Yoruba name for the city of Lagos, and eco, the word for environment. They sit together without resolving.

Episode 01 with Fanja Bouts
Track: Abraxas, Fuck Green New Deal (SOJ Remix)
Degrowth, post-growth economics, and what it means to refuse the logic of endless expansion.

Episode 02 with Sander Zuidhof
Track: Chris Korda, Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong
Population, overpopulation, and who gets to decide how many bodies the world can hold.

Episode 03 with Ivano Tetelepta
Track: Anne-Marie Hunsel, Mi dren
Heritage, decolonisation, and what it means to carry a cultural memory that was systematically interrupted.

Episode 04 — ADE Special with Ambu Bambu of Electronic Identity Crisis, Relate Radio
Track: Pussy Riot, Police State
A crossover episode recorded live for Amsterdam Dance Event. On artistic authenticity in a climate of control, and what it means to make music, or any cultural work, that refuses to perform safety. Ambu Bambu's Electronic Identity Crisis asks what genre something is when it refuses to belong to one. This episode asked the same question of identity itself.

Episode 05 with Marcello Siboni
Track: The Notorious B.I.G., Mo Money Mo Problems
Technocracy, billionaires, and the politics of who accumulates and who pays the cost.

Every episode ends the same way: the conversation stops, and the music takes over. I play. Sometimes, we play.

An expansion of the radio format into a live club experience. This is not a generic club night looking for a slot. If you programme spaces with something to say, get in touch.

Available for venue residencies, festival editions, themed takeovers, and seasonal programming.

Panelist, "(Dis)Trust at the Door: Implicit Bias in Nightlife" and "Ableism in Amsterdam's Cultural Spaces", Pakhuis de Zwijger, 2026

On inclusivity, safety, and the quiet mechanisms of exclusion that operate at the entrance to nightlife spaces, and what a more equitable approach actually looks like in practice.

─────────────────────────

The work is ongoing and so is the conversation. If you are building something that needs a voice, a researcher, a host, or a dancefloor with something to say, I would like to hear about it. Get in touch.