matter gone wild #2
Josèfa Ntjam
40m cube | Rennes, FR
Institutional
12.10.24 - 18.01.25Solo exhibition at 40m cube – centre d'art contemporain
Rennes, FR
With works from several of Josèfa Ntjam’s series, matter gone wild #2 was presented by 40m cube – centre d’art contemporain in Rennes, France, as the second opus of a story that began earlier (1) and can continue in the future.
“It is an opportunity to create a new presentation of these works in order to offer an enriched interpretation. This part of a larger, constantly unfolding whole, which functions like an ecosystem, makes it possible to extend branches and recompose narratives.
Josèfa Ntjam creates stories that blend several genres of written and oral history –fairy tales and legends, science fiction, speculative fiction and natural history–, where the deconstruction of norms gives way to a virtual imaginary, if not what Ursula K. Le Guin calls an ambiguous utopia (2). Present in her creative process, where it is one of her main threads, text appears in fragments or in a more narrative way in films, performances, sound pieces, printed images and sculptures. The exploration of both traditional techniques and cutting-edge technologies (3) is an integral part of her work, as a means to generate a formal hybridity that is nothing other than the concretization of a conceptual hybridity.
For the artist, the concept of digital photomontage operates like a mind map, combining political, documentary, scientific, personal and family references and resources that appear geographically and temporally separated. She uses at least two processes to achieve this. Composed of assembled and harmonized images, the wallpaper dioramas provide the landscape, and therefore the space, in which the characters evolve and the story is told; when these images are superimposed as layers, producing effects of transparency and depth, they add a temporal dimension. Plants hold a special place in Josèfa Ntjam’s universe, in which maquis represents resistance, and the photogrammetry of a plant can give shape to a sculpture. More broadly, the living takes on the role of an intelligent, mobile construction design, of which micro-organisms and cells are just one component among many. From these landscapes, inhabited by ancestral and contemporary creatures, emerge forms that materialize as sculptures in the exhibition space, or come to life in video.
The result is an immersive installation with a dreamlike yet historically grounded atmosphere, featuring characters reminiscent of role-playing or video game heroes. These avatars, at once human and god or goddess, but also animal and plant, live in the works and interpret these modern-day tales. Their biological characteristics are singular, their powers are extraordinary and their personalities are complex. The capacities that the artist gives them are far superior to those conferred to non-playable characters (NPC) in video games.
In the film that gives its name to the exhibition, matter gone wild, the Mixotroph is both a plant and an animal capable of photosynthesis through plant symbiosis, while also feeding like an animal. Its power is fluidity. Named after the activist for the independence of Cameroon, Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié, Marthe is a forest chameleon who changes into a plant to foil the enemy.
In this constellation, Persona is a recurring character that the artist embodies in her performances and her films, which she sees as their extension. Incategorizable, always defying assignment, Persona –“nobody”– is on a perpetual quest. One of Josèfa Ntjam’s previous films, Mélas de Saturne, deals with the impossible search for his origins, whether in the maze of the Internet or in the still inaccessible colonial archives of Cameroon’s independence. This lack of data generates anger, which the artist transforms into a positive energy that consists in breaking out of passivity, and into a creative dynamic, that of speculative fiction. This fills in the gaps, the anxiety-inducing, counterproductive voids. In this way, Persona takes the opposite tack to the NPC, being proac- tive, militant, committed, vehement, impatient, directive, ready to break free from its straitjacket at any moment.
The Incubateur de révolte (Revolt Incubator) that welcomes visitors acts as a prelude to their discovery of the exhibition, a warm-up for their immersion in an abstract, floating and seductive world, whose critical and political dimensions are as many proposals for a new reading and a new interpretation of History.
Josèfa Ntjam’s use of stage devices such as dioramas and digital techniques enables her to create a metaphorical global universe, both macrocosm and microcosm, that is difficult to identify: does it exist in the future? Or in a parallel world? Or it is perhaps a beyond, a space-time where a perpetual movement of change and adaptation offers a hopeful renewal.
Text by Anne Langlois
(1) matter gone wild took place at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in 2023.
(2) Ursula K. Le Guin, Les dépossédés, Harper & Row, 1974.
(3) Some of the works of the exhibition were created during the LVMH Métiers d’Arts residency in 2024.”