Mbindi

Josèfa Ntjam is nominated as a finalist for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2026, for which she presents a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, organised in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Paris. Titled _Mbindi_, the installation features a new film in which Ntjam stages a dialogue between Joseph (her father) and Soñ (his child) in the form of a tarot reading where the cards point to three places synonymous with resilience: the ocean, the village of Malandè in Cameroon, and the maquis of the resistance fighters. These places and their histories are evoked by _Mbindi_, a hybrid creature inspired by the techno-mythological myth of Drexciya, born on Detroit in the 1980s. _Mbindi_ carries the collective memory of an imaginary people descended from African women who were thrown overboard from slave ships while pregnant. Their initiatory journey through an ocean of memory — conceived as an animated environment of fragmented archives — aims to pass on a buried collective narrative to their people. The film explores the role of myth, born of the interplay of memory and forgetting, as a survival mechanism in in the face of trauma. Here, memories metamorphose into living elements of a sensitive ecosystem, sustained by the reparative figure of _Mbindi_.