Jota Mombaça

Jota Mombaça (°1991, BR) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works between Lisbon and Amsterdam. Their work derives from poetry, critical theory and performance. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience.

Through performance, visionary fiction and situational strategies of knowledge production, they intend to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium. Currently, they have been interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anti-colonial imagination and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the Global Art World.

Jota Mombaça – Waterwill (2021-2022)
Jota Mombaça – Ghost 7 (1-10): French Historical Maladie (2023)
Jota Mombaça – Ghost 6: In happiness, uneasy (2022)

• Fobrux

The video Waterwill follows a series of actions in which large pieces of fabric are submerged in water at various locations, developing an underwater archeology of each of those places. The images of these textiles appear in the video accompanied by words and sounds that tell us about the movements of people traversing geographies that are as much political as they are sentimental.

colour video with sound, 11’09”

Collection of the artist
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Martins&Montero

Jota Mombaça’s Ghosts are “water bodies” of textile, dust and mud, previously sunken in various waters, and then dried, re-sewed and hung on iron bars, imprinting the free movements of water against the violence of colonialism, globalization, industrial production and the survival of slavery.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Martins&Montero