Jota Mombaça
Sonsbeek 2026
Park Sonsbeek, Arnhem
Inleiding
the long language (Spiral), 2026
Photo: Django van Ardenne
Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work revolves around elemental forms of sensing and anticolonial imagination. For this new commission, Mombaça offers an installation related to a multidisciplinary opera that departs from her 2023 short story “Stuck in Movement (in the Tide).” In the story, her protagonist transitions from a human existence toward a geological one in a wider narrative arc that considers linear time as a catastrophic cycle. The artist shows how one’s voice, memories, and existence are contingent on the planet—the memory of a larger frame. For this installation, Mombaça creates the stage and characters of an opera scene, in which the protagonist remembers her voice again after a climate catastrophe. Spread out over different levels of the Steile Tuin, the immersive installation comprises a rock-shaped singer, an architectural element, and a spatial soundscape that invites visitors to think about memory as shared with the more-than-human world and not something you can call upon just by yourself. Remembering is an embodied act of tuning into your environment—the cacophony of sounds carried through various beings and materials. To remember means letting go of a sense of individuality and ownership, so that you can tap into what lies beyond human existence.
Listen in the audiotour
About the artist
Jota Mombaça (b. 1991, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil) is an interdisciplinary artist based between Lisbon and Natal whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in her practice. She is currently interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anticolonial imagination, and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the Global Art World. Her solo exhibitions have been held at venues including West Den Haag, 2024; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2024; CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, 2023; and Kadist, San Francisco, 2022. Her work has also been presented at venues such as WIELS, Brussels, 2025; Aspen Art Museum, 2024; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2023; De Appel, Amsterdam, 2022; 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021; 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020; 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia, 2019; and 10th Berlin Biennale, 2018.
Jota Mombaça would like to thank everyone mentioned on page 45; Beatriz Lemos and X Zhu Nowell for the conversations that led to the creation of this new work; Leda Maria Martins for her guidance; and Jaqueline Martins and the Martins&Montero gallery in Brussels for their faith in her practice.
Commissioned by Sonsbeek 2026 in collaboration with Wereldlab (and the Re/presenting Europe NWO consortium)
Made possible in part by Rotary Arnhem and Steenfabriek Vogelensangh