In conversation with Suzette Bell-Roberts, Josèfa Ntjam, whose work is featured in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, explores erased histories, speculative ecologies, and the sonic frequencies that open pathways to new ways of being and knowing.
Installation view of Worlds in Mutation by Josèfa Ntjam during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Suzette Bell-Roberts
In Worlds in Mutation, Josèfa Ntjam invites us into a fluid and ever-transforming universe where sculpture, sound, film, and digital worlds converge to reimagine the architectures of the future. Featured in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, her work navigates the intersections of myth, ecology, and submerged histories, bringing to the surface narratives long suppressed by colonial violence. Ntjam’s practice functions like a living ecosystem, part archive, part speculative fiction, and part sonic transmission, where organisms, memories, and cosmologies continually shift and evolve. Through hybrid beings and layered temporalities, she challenges Western frameworks of identity, biology, and time, offering porous, interconnected modes of existence. In this conversation with Suzette Bell-Roberts, Ntjam discusses deep forgetting, diasporic cosmologies, micro-to-cosmic entanglements, and sound as a portal to nonlinear worlds. What emerges is a practice grounded in worldbuilding and the radical reconfiguration of how we sense, remember, and imagine.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Your work merges digital tools with sculpture, film, and sound. How do these different media allow you to challenge and reconfigure dominant narratives around biology, identity, and futurity?
Working across digital tools, sculpture, film, and sound allows me to fragment and reassemble dominant narratives, especially those that define biology, identity, and futurity through rigid Western frameworks. Each medium gives me a different language to unsettle these boundaries. Digital tools let me stretch identities, dislocate them, and hybridise them with vegetal, aquatic, and mythological. Sculpture anchors these mutations in physical space, allowing them to gain weight, tactility, and presence. Film and sound dissolve linearity and invite viewers into more fluid temporalities, where organisms, memories, and technologies blend. This multiplicity is essential: it creates friction points where normative ideas about what identities are, how they evolve, or where they belong can be reimagined.
Installation view of Worlds in Mutation by Josèfa Ntjam during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Research lies at the core of your practice. What recent historical or philosophical thread has opened a new path for you in developing alternative realities?
Recently, I’ve been drawn to neurological research around deep forgetting, mechanisms through which the brain erases or rewrites memories in moments of extreme pain, such as childbirth or traumatic experiences. This phenomenon resonates with my ongoing interest in archives, erasure, and submerged histories.
It opens a new path for me: thinking of forgetting not as a failure but as a biological strategy, a survival schema, even a portal. It allows me to imagine realities where memory is porous, where pain reorganises narratives, where identity is constantly re-authored.
I’m connecting this research to West and Central African cosmologies, including those of the Dogon, Bassa, Ewondo, and Fon, especially the concepts of disappearance, dissolution, and cyclical time. Together, they form a new philosophical axis for my upcoming projects.
Installation view of Worlds in Mutation by Josèfa Ntjam during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Many of your films feel like portals — hovering between the microscopic and the cosmic. How do these shifting scales influence the way you imagine new worlds?
Shifting from the microscopic to the cosmic isn’t just a formal gesture in my work; it reflects ecological and mythological continuities that already exist in the world. For instance, the blooming of plankton and the rhythm of oceanic tides are directly shaped by the lunar cycle. What happens at the scale of a single microorganism is influenced by a celestial body hundreds of thousands of kilometres away. These supposedly distant scales are already entangled. When I navigate between them in my films, I’m trying to make this entanglement perceptible: that the micro and the cosmic are not opposite poles but part of the same choreography.
Moving between these scales destabilises the human-centred viewpoint and opens space for alternative cosmologies. It allows me to imagine worlds where beings are connected through tides, luminosity, and vibratory forces rather than through hierarchies of size orimportance.
This is crucial for my worldbuilding. It allows me to imagine environments where beings are interconnected not by size or importance, but by rhythm, vibration, and circulation. The portal becomes a device that compresses scales until they resonate. In these shifts, new worlds emerge, worlds where evolution is not linear, where ancestors might be planktonic, machinic, or cosmic.
Installation view of Worlds in Mutation by Josèfa Ntjam during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Suzette Bell-Roberts
You often foreground erased or obscured histories. What draws you to these submerged narratives, and how do they reshape the speculative futures you construct?
I’m drawn to what has sunk, histories discarded, silenced, or fragmented by colonial violences. These submerged narratives carry a different density; they have tidal movements, voids, and echoes. Working with them is a way to refuse the narratives imposed by official historiography. By reactivating these stories, from familial archives to transoceanic memories, from anti-colonial struggles to mythological figures like Nommo or Mami Wata, I can construct speculative futures that are not based on erasure but on re-emergence and transformation. These futures are sedimented, porous, and alive with the ghosts of what has been deliberately forgotten.
Your visual language dissolves fixed categories — human, vegetal, aquatic, machine. What possibilities emerge for you when identity becomes fluid and unfixed?
When identity becomes fluid, new kinships become possible. The boundaries between species or technologies dissolve, and other genealogies appear, not based on blood, territory, or purity, but on resonance, adaptation, and shared vulnerability. This fluidity allows me to imagine bodies that refuse classification: organisms that mutate, merge, or leak into their environment. In my practice, these hybrid beings challenge the violence of taxonomies, especially racialised or biological ones. They propose identities that are unstable, relational, and constantly reconfigured. Music, especially jazz and Afrofuturist sound, is integral to your work.
How does sound help you break away from Western notions of linear time?
Sound – sonic experiments – like jazz, experimental electronics, Drexciyan rhythms, introduce temporal instability. It stretches time, folds it, loops it. It allows histories to reappear not as chronological sequences but as waves, pulses, or subterranean currents. Western time is linear; Afrofuturist sound is tidal. It moves in spirals, glitches, and syncopations. When I work with sound, for my last sonic installation at IAC Villeurbanne (France), I’m composing with these fluid temporalities, where past, present, and speculative futures coexist. It becomes a sonic method of worldbuilding, one where time is less a line than an ocean.
Installation view of Worlds in Mutation by Josèfa Ntjam during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Your installations often evoke post-apocalyptic atmospheres that simultaneously suggest renewal. How do you navigate this tension between collapse and rebirth?
For me, collapse is not an ending. It’s a transformation, a shedding of forms that can no longer hold. The worlds I create often exist after a rupture, but the debris becomes fertile. This tension mirrors many diasporic histories: devastation and reinvention coexisting, the wound and the bloom growing together. In my installations, ruins are not dead matter; they’re compost. They host new ecologies, new mythologies, new alliances between species, mythologies, histories and machines. Renewal emerges from what appears broken.
In creating spaces of transformation and interconnection, what new modes of existence or knowledge do you hope your audiences might glimpse or inhabit? I hope audiences glimpse forms of existence not centred on the human, modes based on fluidity, interdependence, and vibration. I want them to imagine knowledge that doesn’t come from mastery, but from listening: to water, to silence, to archives that survive in fragments or mutations.
If my installations can open a space where viewers feel themselves part of a larger, evolving ecology — where memory, matter, History, and myth intermingle — then new possibilities emerge: for care, for resistance, for imagining futures that escape the frameworks we have inherited.
Josèfa Ntjam’s work is currently on view at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo until January 2026. For more information, visit 36.bienal.org.br.
