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NıCOLETTı is pleased to present total climate part 3: the map and the territory, the third and final chapter of a cycle of exhibitions reflecting upon the relationship between colonial history and ecology. The exhibition features new and existing works by Abbas Zahedi, Alfredo Aceto, Chloé Quenum, Diane Cescutti, Haroun Hayward, Onyeka Igwe, and Theresa Weber.

Inspired by discourses exploring the links between social inequality, structural racism and environmental deterioration, total climate stems from a cycle of research initiated by artist Gaëlle Choisne, curator and researcher Estelle Marois, and NıCOLETTı’s director Camille Houzé. Borrowing its title from American scholar Christina Sharpe, who defines racism not only as an ideology or a set of actions but as a ‘total climate’ – a condition that contaminates the entirety of the environment, down to particles and the air we breathe –, total climate presents the work of artists whose practices conjure the interwovenness of natural and historical processes, exposing the way in which natural exploitation, cultural domination and territorial possession are always already part of the same imperial gesture.

After having analysed how historical mechanisms and trauma are embedding themselves within the material composition of the environment in part 1: the infinitesimal and the mobile (Jun – Jul 2022), part 2: wavelengths (Jun – Jul 2023) focused its attention on notions of knowledge and sensibilities, examining how colonialism operates within the formation of ‘intellectual climates’.

Subtitled the map and the territory, the third chapter examines the ideologies hidden behind established conceptualisations of space and time, not only as the coordinates through which we apprehend the world, but as constructs that shape and govern our perspectives. Echoing Édouard Glissant’s assertion that ‘the world escapes us as comprehension and as concept’, the exhibition asks: How can we think in terms of multiplicity and connection instead of totalising, universalist visions? How can notions such as opacity, errantry, and relationality help us resist the drive to fix, contain, or render the world mappable? How can we engage with the local without reverting to ideas of territorial essentialism or root-identity?

This exhibition originates in the interrogation of two intertwined systems of measure and representation: mapping and timekeeping. Both have been instrumental to colonial expansion, from Renaissance cartographies of the nation-state, to the metric system developed during, and internationally imposed after, the French Revolution. Maps have distorted geographies, erased indigenous space-time(s), and naturalised territorial claims, to the point where the map becomes the territory, representation becomes reality. Likewise, time was standardised in the service of empire and capital. Rooted in sequentiality, history was presented as linear progression: a teleology of technical mastery over nature. Reinforcing North-South power dynamics, ‘time was mapped onto space: Africa was conceptualised as Europe’s past and Europe as everyone’s future, furnishing the ideological justification for imperial civilising mission’, as postcolonial and queer theorist Rahul Rao observes. From marine chronometers that enabled imperial navigation and the Atlantic slave trade, to the introduction of coordinated clocks and time zones, Western dominance is inscribed into the very fabric of time. Capitalist time collapsed into ‘natural’ time, up to space-time compression with material, mental, and social repercussions.

Against this backdrop, through existing and newly commissioned artworks, the artists in the map and the territory embrace and generate tensions within space, time, and all measures in between. Whether through material, sonic, or computational approaches, they invite us to rethink globality, not as the homogenising force of globalisation, but as a relational negotiation of particularities and commonalities. In this context, music helps apprehend and communicate a traumatic history that exceeds the shortcomings of articulated language; it extends our thinking on space and time, because, said Toni Morrison – quoted by Paul Gilroy in The BlackAtlantic – ‘it never really gives you the whole number.’Deeply attuned to music himself, Gilroy turns to the motif of the fractal to manifest the tension between a finite space and an infinite line, measure and dismeasure, algorithm and arrhythmia. The fractal also transforms scale games into shortcuts – instead of providing distinctive units of measure – by expressing the return of the same pattern across different contexts, as well as from intimate levels to world-concepts. Likewise, the artists in the map and the territorystrive to fracture the surface of global cultural hegemony, revealing a never-ending proliferation of subject positions, each a fracture in itself, yet all connected through slippages, returns, and resonances.

The exhibition begins with Swiss-Italian artist Alfredo Aceto, whose work explores time, timelines, and the narratives and politics that shape them. He is particularly interested in how the West – and its industrial apparatus – sustains power by naturalising temporal conventions and obscuring its responsibilities. In the map and the territory, Aceto presents a lineup of Alessi clocks that he shot with a rifle. Aceto began working on this series of works after meeting the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who reminded the artist of an anecdote told by Walter Benjamin of a point during the French Revolution during which people shot the clocks of Paris to break the continuum of History. Bearing ambiguous human traces, Aceto’s clocks mirror and expose the constructed nature of time and the acts of concealment surrounding it.

The exhibition continues with a sculpture by French artist Diane Cescutti, whose work explores the idea that modern computer technology has its roots in the loom, intertwining investigations into the history of coding with reflections into traditions of weaving. In Glassweave (2024), the artist creates an abstract map by weaving glass threads. Through this gesture, Cescutti generates a material object with the techniques used to map and visualise mathematical concepts, establishing a parallel between the interlaced threads of the loom and its intangible counterpart: the algorithm.

Alternative modes of mapping also appear in Haroun Hayward’s painting Tainted Love (Sunflower and the Sun, 2024), which weaves together artistic references – ranging from abstraction to post-war landscape traditions – with a deep engagement in textile motifs and musical processes rooted in his experience of rave culture. Conjuring maps that incorporate the coordinates of emotions, memories and rhythms, his work denotes an interest in repetition, expressed in music through sampling and remixing, and in textiles through woven patterns. Translating sound into visual forms, his practice seeks to uncover a possibility for symbiosis across disparate communities, geographies and temporalities.

In her specifically-commissioned series Trois Follies, French-Beninese artist Chloé Quenum also references musical traditions by incorporating pewter musical instruments into sculptural forms based on ancient forms of cartography and architecture. Furthering the artist’s research into the history and cultural function of musical instruments, which led to her exhibition L’Heure Bleue, presented in the Benin pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Trois Follies questions how the world has been represented, measured and fixed by dominant narratives. In Globe de Crates, Quenum revisits one of the most ancient attempts at mapping the world by Crates of Mallos (180-150 BCE), replacing the initial continents and oceans by bronze flutes and bells to propose a geography that is fluid and resonant. Similar ideas are explored in Mappa Mundi di Albi, based on an 8th century map that represented the inhabited world in the form of a horseshoe, structured according to principles of order and hierarchy. Here, music disrupts the established order, revealing the ideological layers hidden beneath the lines. Shaped like a pyramid, the third sculpture explores architecture as a tool of authority: cymbals and bells embedded in the structure evoke the role of sound in rituals of legitimation.

Not only referencing but playing music, Abbas Zahedi’s Nicoletti Bells (2025) is a site-specific installation building on the research initiated for the artist’s current solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London. Here, Zahedi presents a sculpture made from reinforcement bars sprouting from the gallery’s wall, with repurposed nitrous oxide canisters – objects formerly associated with recreational euphoria used in Shoreditch’s raves, now reclassified as controlled substances under the UK’s Psychoactive Substances Act –, fanning outward like infrastructural bells. They extend the latent directionality and volume of the space’s hidden architecture, materially and sonically, articulating alternative modes of circulation and orientation. A soundwork runs from an amplifier wired into the gallery’s heater system, rendering the energetic undercurrents of the space audible; echo and reverb reintroduce the past sounds into the present, while sound is not localised, but vibrates across space and bodies.

In her sculptural collages inserted in resin, German artist Theresa Weber explores material history as a site of transformation, hybridity, and extension. Taking the form of imaginary maps, her work is made of materials referencing Caribbean cultural traditions and everyday life – artificial nails, braided hairpieces, pearls, jewellery, textiles, prosthetics, silicone –, which the artist recomposes into new associations that decode and re-semanticise the narratives they hold.

The exhibition finishes with No Archive Can Restore You (2019), a film by British-Nigerian artist Onyeka Igwe, which was shot in the former Nigerian Film Unit building, one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine: the Colonial Film Unit. Exploring the archive as not merely a repository of documents but a physical site where history is authorised, cultures are validated, and collective memory is shaped, Igwe’s film seeks to expand what the archive can hold and explore how time-based media might contribute to disrupting its tendency to calcify narratives within linear time. Here, the rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Taking its title from the 2018 Julietta Singh book, No Archive Can RestoreYou is an investigation into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.

This text was co-authored by Estelle Marios and Camille Houzé.