Dislocation (2022)
Josèfa Ntjam (Exhibition)
Dislocation is a film telling the story of a fictional character pursuing an initiatory journey from the internet(s) to a cave floating into outer space. Here the character called Persona encounters constellations of asteroid-like shells and fossils. As Persona is subtly inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence, she loses her gender. The cave’s walls happen to be windows projecting the family archives, melting together with Persona, whose humanoid envelope has vanished.
The film highlights the power of transformation, showing the shift of perception and break in consciousness. It pushes the viewers to enter the infinite space of perpetual reconfiguration. What if organisms were dissoluble? If they could spread and leak without boundaries, infiltrating interstices of worlds where time and space would not exist? What if categories and labels no longer exist? Dislocation searches for arrangements between temporalities, histories and hybrid bodies.
About the artist
Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Gleaning the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity and race.
Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions and philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction.
