INTRICATIONS

A world resurfaces, fragment by fragment, in the slow rhythm of reassembling forms. For her largest exhibition to date, Josèfa Ntjam transforms the 1,200 square meters of the Institute of contemporary art and the display windows
of the Gare Part-Dieu metro station into a sensory, political, and mythological drift. A territory where everything wavers: textures, voices, memories. Here, form follows the fracture, and legend echoes the pulse of an underground heart.

The title, INTRICATIONS, comes from quantum physics. It speaks to this: that two particles, even separated by lightyears, can continue to resonate together. It is this bond— woven between things that seemed worlds apart, skin and metal, revolt and plant life, a scream and a comet—that flows through the entire journey of the exhibition.

One enters as if stepping into a forest of images—a threshold of matter, dense, almost impenetrable. Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié, Élisabeth Djouka, Mafory Bangoura stand watch here, guardians of the stories about to be told. In their wake appears Persona, a shifting entity, embodied yet unbound, traversed by voices, bodies, and data. She never speaks from a singular “I,” but from a network: one of Black memory, matriarchal lineages, queer identities, and buried histories. Her voice is diffracted, doubled, as if to signal that any act of speaking from the margins is always layered. In her passage, she carves the bed of historical narrative, letting myths, inheritances, and possibilities flow through.

Spiritualities tied to the elements, Dogon, Fang, and Bassa cosmogonies, stories born in exile... these do not merely add up: they respond to and rub against each other, generating new images, beings on the run. For what is at stake here is a mythology of flight—not as abandonment, but as strategy, as the science of escape and displacement. This weaving calls for another map, another ground: that of the living, not as backdrop, but as ally. The figures Josèfa Ntjam invokes—mycelium, hydras, corals—are not ornaments. They are language. They embody a quiet strength: the power to build in the shadows, endlessly regenerating. Here, the living is resistance. It connects and infiltrates; it sustains.

INTRICATIONS unfolds like an expanding fiction. To compose it, Josèfa Ntjam draws on everything: cardboard and bio-resin, video game engines and artificial intelligence, sand, metal, and song. She experiments. She blends. She assembles as one invents worlds. Technologies become organs, materials turn into messengers, and installations become bodies in transformation.

All around, the cosmos resonates. It is not a backdrop, but an open-air archive—a space to house the voices cast out of history’s frame. At its core: a sound installation, the artist’s first of its kind, conceived specifically for the IAC. A sensitive center of gravity, it acts as a beating heart, a chamber of echoes that
absorbs and redistributes the vibrations of the exhibition.

In INTRICATIONS, fiction is alive. It does not illuminate; it whispers, twists, and pulls us along. And perhaps, with it, our gaze too begins to recompose itself. Josèfa Ntjam stands in the lineage of those who think with fiction—not to flee the real, but to reveal its hidden folds. With Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Drexciya, or Kodwo Eshun, she dreams—yes—but dreams with teeth, with roots, with the sea.

• Josèfa Ntjam