The Boiler Room Is Heating Up: From the Sweaty Streets of Lagos to Berlinale with “MUSCLE”

While February’s sharp Berlin frost drifts from Potsdamer Platz toward the industrial texture of Wedding, down in the lowest level of Apartment No:26—the Boiler Room—the pressure is rising. Our machines are now working on a work that fuses Nigeria’s chaotic energy, the smell of sweat, and metallic tones with Berlin’s gray aesthetic. “MUSCLE” (2025), directed by Karimah Ashadu and making its international premiere in the Forum Expanded section of the 76th Berlinale, proves on screen that cinema is not merely something watched, but something felt on the skin.

With the echoes of her ongoing “Tendered” exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London still resonating, Ashadu’s lens now invites us into the makeshift open-air gyms of Lagos’s shantytowns. This is not a success story or a classic sports documentary; it is a 22-minute poetic inventory of the body being reconstructed as a site of labor, a fortress of resistance, and an art object.

The Abstraction of the Body: A Camera as Close as Breath

“MUSCLE” refuses to hide behind a lead character or a linear plot. Leaving the viewer alone with Lagos’s bodybuilders, Ashadu uses the camera almost like a detective of skin pores. She gets so close to her subjects that the screen becomes filled with swollen muscles, pronounced veins, and skin glistening with sweat.

At this point, cinematography ceases to be merely an observational tool and becomes physical contact. The camera’s slow, deliberate movements sometimes capture the figures so intimately that the human body turns undefined, abstract, and sculptural. The air on this floor grows heavy here; because Ashadu takes the Black male body out of the grip of societal prejudices and “one-dimensional” representations, placing it in a space of existence that is simultaneously vulnerable and majestic.

A Metallic Ritual: The Syncopated Dance of Muscle and Sound

Can you hear, rising among the noises of the boiler room, the characteristic metallic clanging of weights? “MUSCLE” is not only a visual feast but also an auditory choreography. In the film, the collision sounds of weights intertwine with the guttural exhales of the athletes exerting effort, blending seamlessly with the ambient noise of Lagos streets.

When the rhythm of the Yoruba language merges with the pace of breathing, a “syncopated sound design” emerges that turns the viewer into a participant in the ritual on screen. Ashadu treats sound not as ornamentation but as evidence of the labor the body expends. This is a narrative as honest and bare as the turning of every gear in the machines of our “Boiler Room.”

Karimah Ashadu: Archaeologist of Labor and Identity

The British-born Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu is today referred to in the cinema world as an “archaeologist of labor.” Having once again proven herself with the Silver Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Ashadu has throughout her career traced the lives of figures ranging from Lagos horse riders to slaughterhouse workers.

Her filmography carries a philosophy that seeps into every floor of Apartment No:26: autonomy. She narrates Nigeria’s post-colonial identity, patriarchy, and the struggle for economic independence not through grand political statements, but through the knot of muscle on a man’s back or the fall of a water sack to the ground. Living between Hamburg and Lagos, the artist brings this narrative to its peak with “MUSCLE.”

We have reached the end of this session in the boiler room, yet the sweaty, metallic atmosphere Ashadu has created seems ready to spill over the concrete walls of Silent Green and spread across every floor of our building.