Jota Mombaça, SINKING COULD BE, 2022, De Appel, Amsterdam, performance view
2025. Jota Mombaça
Utterance and the understanding of the elemental nature of words and sounds are central to Jota Mombaça’s work. This primordial nature is significant not only in terms of importance but also in the physical and philosophical understandings of what is elementary, as explored by Brazilian thinker Denise Ferreira da Silva. The author, who is deeply engaged with and debated by Mombaça—who is also a writer herself—proposes a system of equations and inequations for the scientific understanding of sensitive epistemologies rooted in African and Afro-diasporic traditions, challenging the rigid boundaries that dominate the production of scientific and academic knowledge while carefully analyzing the aesthetic and poetic ramifications arising from colonial violence in the artistic panorama.
Confronting this colonial brutality, Mombaça addresses the mirrored dynamics of social and environmental violence, understanding corporeal and subjective existence as inseparable from ecological premises. Whole existence is achieved through anticolonial justice. Performative practice becomes an embodied enactment of critical theory. Interdisciplinarity asserts the right to free movement. The refusal of biological categorizations between notions of natural life functions as a tool for systemic healing. This is stressed in earlier works by Mombaça towards thresholds between monstrosity and humanity—an inquiry that persists in her ongoing engagement with cognitive apparatuses that dictate reality. Her work collides with speculative, fabulative, and visionary fiction to interrogate the frameworks that attempt to impose order and certainty.
In Seu sangue é terra que ninguém pisa (Your Blood Is Land Where No One Steps In), 2024, Mombaça buries herself in her native soil, yet rather than an act of erasure, this burial is an embrace, a return, an elemental convergence. She claims the right to return to the land— not through violent death or forced displacement, but by choice. This gesture extends from the return of the body to its mineral and elemental origins to the right of migrants to reclaim and return to their homelands without the specter of deportation. By dismantling the linear temporality of the neoliberal world, Mombaça aligns herself with Brazilian scholar Leda Maria Martins, rejecting the narratives of exclusion imposed on racialized and dissident bodies. The voluntary burial defies the death sentence imposed on marginalized people and counters rising anti-immigration movements, instead proposing a holistic reunion—physical and spiritual, a process of restoration and interdependence. This notion of elemental attunement and transformation is echoed in SINKING COULD BE, 2022, where Mombaça explores the poetic and morphological fluidity of sand and its connections to the water’s embrace in a blue-lit installation.
Furthering the discussion on elementality, Mombaça questions whether words and sound—sometimes the sound of words spoken, whispered, sung, or screamed—belong to the same ontological order. In Por isso muito cuidado, 2024, and anticipation (at dawn), 2023, she pushes language to a zero-degree articulation, where words are broken down and repeated until they become traces, material symptoms, and graphic pulsations. Gestures accumulate into forms that suggest beings, systems, and landscapes. Simultaneously, Mombaça reminds us of the mechanical aspects of sound, which—regardless of cultural and linguistic codification—vibrates and moves both bodies and nature. Even when unintelligible, words can still be physically felt, behaving as catalysts of action.
In Así desaparecemos (Thus We Disappear), 2019, a performance developed in Bogotá, Colombia, Mombaça recites a compilation of manifestos produced by communities affected by the continuum of colonial violence in Colombia and Brazil. It confronts and disrupts colonial logic, demanding a redistribution of rights and languages. Holding sheets of paper meant to be consumed by fire, she reads a speech pragmatically reconfiguring a nonlinear vocalization—a reading strategy against systemic erasure. The performance references two historical episodes: the official 1890 order to burn all Brazilian slavery-related documents two years after abolition, and the 2018 fire that destroyed Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum due to the State neglect of cultural heritage. Mombaça’s address names whiteness, financial wealth, cisnormativity, and colonialism as determining factors in the valuation and treatment of specific individuals, ideas, and communities. In this context, discursive violence—and the understanding of the body as both discourse and inseparable from discourse—becomes an inciter for resistance, reclaiming and reimagining deliberately destroyed knowledge.
In recent works, Mombaça has intentionally circumvented political literalism, a tendency deeply embedded in Latin American performance traditions, while resisting the spectacularized consumption of images featuring Black and/or trans bodies. She no longer finds it necessary to expose her own body or place it at the center of her practice in ways that risk violating bodily privacy. Instead, she asserts a right to opacity, to the complexity of existence, and to an opposition to absolute transparency. As in all of her work, she critically examines the regimes of legitimacy, the distribution of resources, and the value systems that shape the art world.
Text originally published in CURA, Issue 44, Spring-Summer 2025
Confronting this colonial brutality, Mombaça addresses the mirrored dynamics of social and environmental violence, understanding corporeal and subjective existence as inseparable from ecological premises. Whole existence is achieved through anticolonial justice. Performative practice becomes an embodied enactment of critical theory. Interdisciplinarity asserts the right to free movement. The refusal of biological categorizations between notions of natural life functions as a tool for systemic healing. This is stressed in earlier works by Mombaça towards thresholds between monstrosity and humanity—an inquiry that persists in her ongoing engagement with cognitive apparatuses that dictate reality. Her work collides with speculative, fabulative, and visionary fiction to interrogate the frameworks that attempt to impose order and certainty.
In Seu sangue é terra que ninguém pisa (Your Blood Is Land Where No One Steps In), 2024, Mombaça buries herself in her native soil, yet rather than an act of erasure, this burial is an embrace, a return, an elemental convergence. She claims the right to return to the land— not through violent death or forced displacement, but by choice. This gesture extends from the return of the body to its mineral and elemental origins to the right of migrants to reclaim and return to their homelands without the specter of deportation. By dismantling the linear temporality of the neoliberal world, Mombaça aligns herself with Brazilian scholar Leda Maria Martins, rejecting the narratives of exclusion imposed on racialized and dissident bodies. The voluntary burial defies the death sentence imposed on marginalized people and counters rising anti-immigration movements, instead proposing a holistic reunion—physical and spiritual, a process of restoration and interdependence. This notion of elemental attunement and transformation is echoed in SINKING COULD BE, 2022, where Mombaça explores the poetic and morphological fluidity of sand and its connections to the water’s embrace in a blue-lit installation.
Furthering the discussion on elementality, Mombaça questions whether words and sound—sometimes the sound of words spoken, whispered, sung, or screamed—belong to the same ontological order. In Por isso muito cuidado, 2024, and anticipation (at dawn), 2023, she pushes language to a zero-degree articulation, where words are broken down and repeated until they become traces, material symptoms, and graphic pulsations. Gestures accumulate into forms that suggest beings, systems, and landscapes. Simultaneously, Mombaça reminds us of the mechanical aspects of sound, which—regardless of cultural and linguistic codification—vibrates and moves both bodies and nature. Even when unintelligible, words can still be physically felt, behaving as catalysts of action.
In Así desaparecemos (Thus We Disappear), 2019, a performance developed in Bogotá, Colombia, Mombaça recites a compilation of manifestos produced by communities affected by the continuum of colonial violence in Colombia and Brazil. It confronts and disrupts colonial logic, demanding a redistribution of rights and languages. Holding sheets of paper meant to be consumed by fire, she reads a speech pragmatically reconfiguring a nonlinear vocalization—a reading strategy against systemic erasure. The performance references two historical episodes: the official 1890 order to burn all Brazilian slavery-related documents two years after abolition, and the 2018 fire that destroyed Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum due to the State neglect of cultural heritage. Mombaça’s address names whiteness, financial wealth, cisnormativity, and colonialism as determining factors in the valuation and treatment of specific individuals, ideas, and communities. In this context, discursive violence—and the understanding of the body as both discourse and inseparable from discourse—becomes an inciter for resistance, reclaiming and reimagining deliberately destroyed knowledge.
In recent works, Mombaça has intentionally circumvented political literalism, a tendency deeply embedded in Latin American performance traditions, while resisting the spectacularized consumption of images featuring Black and/or trans bodies. She no longer finds it necessary to expose her own body or place it at the center of her practice in ways that risk violating bodily privacy. Instead, she asserts a right to opacity, to the complexity of existence, and to an opposition to absolute transparency. As in all of her work, she critically examines the regimes of legitimacy, the distribution of resources, and the value systems that shape the art world.
Text originally published in CURA, Issue 44, Spring-Summer 2025
Jota Mombaça, SINKING COULD BE, 2022, De Appel, Amsterdam, installation view
Jota Mombaça, SINKING SHIP/PROSPERITY, 2022, Kadist, San Francisco, installation views