matter gone wild, Josèfa Ntjam

Josèfa Ntjam has imagined an immersive exhibition that will focus on notions of dissident networks, often hidden and encrypted, and the strength required to mobilize them. The exhibition will focus on the maquis, a revolutionary biotope intertwined in a cluster of plant cells observed under a microscope, as well as mythological figures, often metaphors for struggles past and future - always future.

These presences include revolutionary figures such as Marthe Moumié, Ernest Ouandié, Ruben Um Nyobe, Sankara, Toni Morrison, SunRa and Henrietta Lacks, as well as mythological chimeras and divinities with powers as ancestral as they are forward-looking: Mami Wata, Amma & Nommo, Hilolombi... In other words, what we're talking about here is reweaving the links between (our) different revolutionary struggles, both human and non-human, to understand their affinities - political, social, historical, philosophical, poetic and "poiethic".

But we shouldn't forget the power of plants either. From the care they provide us, to their defensive toxicity (far from the supposed passivity of flora, imposed by colonialism), or of course, their link to spirituality; rhizomes, lianas and mycelium are like subterranean connection networks. No longer merely metaphorical, they are a source of concrete inspiration and ally*es. It is in this biotope of specific and rallied revolts, mixing sound, poetry, video installations and sculptures, that questions will arise about what haunts us, and carries us, in order to pe[a]nser future strategies of resistance. Is there a place for fiction and poetry? What does it mean to (re)create a revolutionary imagination?

Photo : Josèfa Ntjam, MARTH, 2023, still video#2. © ADAGP, Paris, 2023