EXHIBITION

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer, and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, moving image, and sound. She collects the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences, and photographic archives. She uses the technique of assemblage to bring together images, words, sounds, and stories as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying dominant discourses on origin, identity, and the construct of race. Her work weaves together multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific processes, and philosophical concepts, which she confronts using references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, and religious symbolism.

swell of spæc(i)es unfolds a new creation myth fusing ancient and emergent ways of conceiving the universe. It takes the form of an otherworldly environment shaped by a rich soundscape, a cyclical film, and radiant sculptures that send out voices and vibrations.

The project roots itself in Ntjam’s research into water as a container for multiple histories and mythologies, from colonial domination and extraction to narratives of emancipation and resistance. She sees these as intertwined, since the movement of people across the globe is necessarily shaped or affected by slavery and forced migration.

For this work, the artist explored links between oceans and outer space, both mythologically and scientifically. One point of departure for the project was the recent identification of limestone—in the debris of a former planet orbiting the remnant of a star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel and shed its outer layers. This phenomenon is called a “white dwarf.” Limestone is a type of rock primarily formed through the sedimentation of the skeletons of plankton and other marine organisms. Ntjam focussed on plankton, an organism defined by its migration in currents, as a speculative point of convergence between Earth and space. Her narrative starts with plankton as an apt carrier of memory across these realms.

In the cyclical film, memories of colonial resistance are embedded within various types of plankton. These hybrid creatures morph between different forms inspired by the life phases and processes of the different species of plankton. They are seen forming radiant stars in reference to a chemical process called bioluminescence, which is an emission of light by living organisms. They can also be seen creating shields of mucus, and hardening into shells, fossils, and limestone. Their transformations become a connecting thread in weaving characters and plot points drawn from Dogon and Huaorani creation stories into an expansive new myth. The Dogon myth tells the story of Amma, a deity who created the stars by launching pellets of earth into the sky, and Nommo, twin water spirits; The Huaorani tale is about a snake that eats the stars to make the first vegetation, waterways, and marine life. In Ntjam’s version, Amma casts limestone into space, breaking the rock into asteroids and luminous plankton stars. The stars are devoured by an astral snake, and harden into fossils in its belly. From the snake’s mouth emerges a fossil planet, where Nommo creates the planet’s marine life, including an octopus that transforms into Amma, and the cycle begins again.

This story of transformation and resurgence is rendered through a blend of 3D animation and footage from aquariums, as well as a soundscape composed by Fatima Al Qadiri. Each character in the cyclical film represents a blend of different species and memories and has been synthesized using AI and other digital tools. Sources include 3D models of marine life, images of West African statues held in Western collections, and photographs of figures from liberation movements, such as Elisabeth Djouka, Marthe Ekemeyong Moumie, and Ntjam’s grandfather, who each fought against French colonial troops as part of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon. France’s colonial massacres in Cameroon were widely erased from Western archives and narratives, and a document declassification process only began in 2022. Ntjam has repeatedly included these photographs in her work as a kind of persistent testimony, often in the form of collages in caves, water bubbles, membranes, and celestial bodies. This approach of embedding contested histories in landscapes and organisms is influenced by Drexciya,1 an electronic music duo whose mythology tells of an underwater population born out of the wrecks of the Atlantic slave trade, and composer Sun Ra, who envisioned Saturn as a host planet for Afro-diasporic people.

The film’s narration emerges from two radiant, marine-like sculptures resembling jellyfish. Voice is a significant part of Ntjam’s work, as the form through which myths and histories have spread and evolved over the course of centuries. Here, a voice emanates from a pearl under the dome of each jellyfish, switching from one to the other during the run of the film. The narration uses the first person, but the identity behind the “I” is multiple and constantly shifting. It poetically channels the film’s mythology through the flow of a personal chronicle interwoven with reflections on the interconnectedness of life and the cosmos, and the endless cycles of transformation and renewal. The sculptures’ form is based on a floating robotic jellyfish that appears in the opening scene of Sun Ra and John Coney’s 1974 film Space Is the Place.2 They are constructed from innovative materials including bio-sourced sunflower seed resin, hemp, and hay.

The entire space of swell of spæc(i)es is conceived entirely by the artist, from the topographical seating to the lighting, environmental colour, and the layout of the works within the presentation space.

Upon leaving the installation, you are invited into the reading room, where you are welcome to contemplate, rest, and peruse books and articles that have inspired the artist’s research process. The window lighting has been conceived with Ntjam to emulate a liminal state that could be sunrise or sunset.

swell of spæc(i)es points toward possibilities for relation outside of imposed classifications of origin and identity. Its amalgamation of sources creates a mapping of speculative connections between the perspectives, projections, conditions, and adaptations of different cultures and species. It proposes a “non-origin of species”—a circular story that contends with a universe in continual expansion. It is a point of convergence between the deep ocean and outer space, biological and mythical realms, possible pasts, and alternative futures; a creation myth without end.

As the artist describes it, “swell of spæc(i)es is an alchemical process in perpetual agitation, the alloying of ancestral geneses with new image creation technologies.”

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgG-QiChiA8
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCPrIEliZc

Text: A collaboration between PHI and LAS Art Foundation

• One Ocean, Two Seas, Three Continents, Wilfried Nsondé

• Autobiography of an Octopus and Other Anticipatory Tales, Vinciane Despret

• The Neverending Tree (L’arbre sans fin), Claude Ponti

• The Wisdom of Lianas (La sagesse des lianes), Dénètem Touam Bona

• Octavia’s Brood, edited by Adrienne Maree Brown & Walidah Imarisha

• From Margin to Center: Feminist Theory, bell hooks

• The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life, Stacy Alaimo

• Peoples of the Abyss – The Great Vertical Migration (Peuples des abysses – La grande migration verticale)

• More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun

• The Book of Drexciya, Volume One, Abdul Qadim Haqq

• Underworlds: A Compelling Journey through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined, Stephen Ellcock

• Art Forms from the Abyss, Ernst Haeckel

• Tales of Amazonian Wisdom (Contes des sages d’Amazonie), Pierre-Olivier Bannwarth

• Diabolical Tales from Haiti (Contes diaboliques d’Haïti), Mimi Barthélémy

• Village Evenings – Tales from Cameroon (Soirées au village – Contes du Cameroun), Gabriel E. Mfomo

• Origins of the World – Tales and Legends from Cameroon (Aux origines du monde – contes et légendes du Cameroun), Didier Reuss-Nliba & Jessica Reuss-Nliba

• Kindred, Octavia E. Butler

• The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (À perte de mère – sur les routes Atlantiques de l’esclavage), Saidiya Hartman

• Wonderama, Hugues Reip, Rodolphe Burger & Vinciane Despret

• The Deep, River Solomon

• The Panther’s Speech (Le discours de la panthère), Jérémie Moreau

• Djinns, Seynabou Sonko

• Sun Ra: The Immeasurable Equation. The Collected Poetry and Prose, compiled by Hartmut Geerken, James L. Wolf (introduction), Sigrid Hauff

• Red in Blue, Trilogy, Léonora Miano

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