Indeterminacy as a Space of Resistance and Otherness in swell of…

Accueil | Home Antenna Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. Installation view at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti Indeterminacy as a Space of Resistance and Otherness in swell of spæc(i)es by Josèfa Ntjam Article PHI Article PHI July 3rd, 2026 By Roxane Lafrance By Roxane Lafrance July 3rd, 2026 Share Share Share Facebook Bluesky Copy URL URL copied! Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. Installation view at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti Upon entering the immersive installation by Franco-Cameroonian artist Josèfa Ntjam, we might wonder if we are gazing into the intergalactic night or the fathomless opacity of a deep chasm. Are we being led into a speculative fiction or invited to reactivate our suppressed memories? Presented as part of MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain, swell of spæc(i)es is an environment where indeterminateness is a form of resistance against the hegemonic frameworks of Western thought. The piece transforms itself into a space of fertile friction where mythical tales, historical archives, and future projections meet. This hybrid constellation provides a platform for marginalized stories and knowledge: Dogon and Huaorani creation myths form a dialogue with memories of the Cameroon War of Independence. [1] Composed primarily of two sound sculptures and a 3D animated video, the installation reinvents the creation myth of the universe where species, materialities, mythological creatures, and historical figures come together in a cosmic/aquatic landscape. Plankton, the central character of this narrative, effectively represents the spatial-temporal hybridity that the work promotes. When this half-animal, half-plant organism dies, its remains accumulate on the ocean floor and form calcareous stratifications. Over millions of years, tectonic pressure and retreating waters transform these sediments into mountains, seamlessly encompassing many categories of space, matter, and areas of scientific research, from biology to geology. [1] In keeping with this notion of transformation, elements in the film’s narrative aren’t presented as isolated objects, but as part of a broader system of intra-actions, a term used by the philosopher and physicist Karen Barad in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. [2] Unlike the term interaction, which implies that material bodies are wholly independent objects, intra-action dispels the notion of boundaries between the Earth’s elements, and instead considers them as part of a vast, dynamic, porous, and connected system where matter can never completely be separated into distinct objects. [3] As evidenced in the planktonic calcification process, it is through these intra-actions that matter transforms itself, generates phenomenons, and affects reality. With this understanding of the universe in constant creative filiation, Barad views the production of knowledge as a practice for framing reality. As such, she considers techno-scientific apparatuses, much like the humans who use them, to be creators of agential cuts, acting on what will or will not be represented in the generation of scientific theories. Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. Installation view at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti “[…] apparatuses are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices—specific material (re)configurings of the world—which come to matter. […] reality is (iteratively) (re)constituted through the (re)making of boundaries.” [2] – Karen Barad Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. Installation view at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti The philosopher Donna Haraway qualifies these reconfigurations of the world as reductionist boundary projects: a process that would ideologically cut the material connections between the biosphere’s entities to translate them into separate, fixed categories, thus perpetuating the idea that matter is inert and exploitable rather than having this creative filiation. In addition, Haraway adds that every system of vision, of creating boundaries, inevitably stems from a specific sociopolitical context and, from that moment on, cannot provide a completely neutral vision of reality. [4] Haraway is critical of the rhetoric of modern science that claims to offer a rational and objective view of the world but which, paradoxically, tends to impose a Western interpretation of reality as universal knowledge, positioning white men as the only generators of knowledge. To recognize knowledge systems derived from otherness, the universe of swell of spæc(i)es offers an “awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with moving energies […] a weaving dance.” [5] Through their polymorphic nature and constant movement, matter, spaces, species, and the Dogon and Huaorani mythological legends the experience refers to, circumvent the reductive fixedness of Western scientific categorizations to instead represent oral narratives and intra-actions based in constant evolution. To counter the reductionism that hegemonic thinking imposes on the world, Martinican philosopher Édou