A photograph of a revolutionary can be an endpoint. It can also be a beginning. Josèfa Ntjam takes images of Black people who resisted colonial power and places them among roots, marine forms, microscopic life and invented creatures. The portrait no longer sits alone in the clean space of an archive. It enters an ecosystem where other histories, bodies and kinds of intelligence press against it. An image from the past begins to move through a future it was never expected to reach.
Ntjam's work across sculpture, photomontage, film, sound and performance has brought those ecosystems into galleries from France to Stockholm. Her 2024–25 exhibition at Fotografiska Stockholm, Futuristic Ancestry: Warping Matter and Space-time(s), combined biomorphic sculpture, video installation and photomontage on plexiglass and aluminium. The surfaces themselves mattered. A translucent panel can make an image seem to float. A metal plate changes the way light returns from it. Her layered figures appear between kinds of matter just as the narratives cross between documented history and speculative possibility.
The French artist, born in Metz to a Cameroonian father and a mother of French and German heritage, has spoken with care about Afrofuturism. She once worked within the Black(s) to the Future collective, but has grown wary of the word becoming a marketable visual style. For her, its stronger use is methodological: a practice of research and collage that connects histories, images and ideas usually kept apart. That distinction is visible in the art. An octopus or an underwater city is not a decorative shortcut to “the future.” It is part of a method for asking what survived a violent past and what forms of life might grow from its fragments.
An archive under water
Water recurs throughout Ntjam's work because it refuses to hold a fixed shape. In a 2021 conversation with NERO, she described its physical and metaphorical fluidity. It carries histories of migration, science, politics and the Atlantic slave trade without resolving them into one meaning. She also spoke about the Detroit electronic duo Drexciya and their imagined underwater world linked to the children of enslaved women who died during the Middle Passage. The reference does not turn the ocean into a simple symbol of loss. It gives a submerged space an unsettling form of imagined life.
Ntjam's family history informs the archival problem. She has said that her grandfather was involved in resistance to French colonial rule in Cameroon and that much of the detail available to her survives as blurred family memory rather than a complete official record. In an ArtReview interview, she described using family photographs when other documentation of Cameroonian independence struggles proved difficult to find. She combines them with images from archives and with material she generates herself, including microscopic views of plants and a photograph of mould from a fish tank. The result refuses the false neatness of a historical picture in which everything missing has been restored.
Photomontage gives that refusal a form. One image can cover, interrupt or open another. The lines between them do not need to disappear. A viewer sees the act of joining. Ntjam has compared her process to a network of roots and membranes in which stories and people connect through more than a chronological sequence. This is a way of thinking against the schoolbook paragraph that takes one country or one event at a time. Black anti-colonial struggles in Cameroon, Europe and the Americas did not happen in sealed compartments. Her compositions give their relations a spatial rather than simply chronological shape.
The material is often strange because the histories themselves have been made strange by omission. Ntjam places political figures into ecosystems drawn from science, myth and fiction. She does not claim that a microscopic plant and a revolutionary are the same kind of thing. Their meeting offers another way to see resistance: as adaptation, mutual dependence and the capacity to persist through hostile conditions. The image can carry a real person without pretending that a collage can supply every missing fact of that person's life.
Stockholm's future ancestry
At Fotografiska Stockholm, Futuristic Ancestry made these crossings of scale and time visible through multiple media. The venue recorded works including the 2023 photomontages Molecular Genealogies, Ceremony #2, astralizing names and Fire Next Time. Their titles already move between the intimate and the immense: ancestry at the molecular level, a ceremony that may repeat, names sent toward stars, a phrase charged with political urgency. The works were shown alongside biomorphic sculptures and video, making the exhibition an environment rather than a sequence of isolated pictures.
Fotografiska's description points to plants and marine life as sources of form. Microorganisms, fungi and plankton have ways of surviving and communicating that can be understood through scientific observation. Ntjam borrows their images to make human histories feel less fixed and solitary. A family archive is not simply a stack of photographs; it is part of a living network of stories, omissions and new readings. In Stockholm, that argument was offered to viewers in a city with its own histories of migration and contested belonging, although the works did not need to be rewritten as Swedish narratives to speak there.
The location matters in another sense. Ntjam is based in France, yet a first Swedish solo exhibition allowed the project to travel without being reduced to a tour of “African heritage” for a Nordic audience. Its title pairs futurity with ancestry as active processes. An ancestor is not only someone fixed behind the living. A future is not only what has not yet happened. In the exhibition, a family photograph and an imagined organism can occupy one visual field. Their adjacency lets viewers consider inheritance as a force that changes rather than merely repeats.
The show's plexiglass and aluminium photomontages give this relation a physical edge. Transparent or reflective materials do not behave like paper. They interact with the visitor's position and the room's light. Images can appear layered within a surface or return the surrounding space to the viewer. Ntjam's formal choices support a history that changes with the act of looking. The image does not pretend to be a sealed window onto a single recoverable past. It is a constructed meeting between materials, memories and an observer in the present.
A new creation story
For the 2024 Venice Biennale, Ntjam developed swell of spæc(i)es, an immersive installation commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. The work joins a large curved-screen film to sound, sculptural listening points and creatures that suggest marine life. Its world is at once cosmic and aquatic. Outer space and deep sea are often presented as opposites, one above and one below. Ntjam lets their forms mingle, so that a jellyfish can feel nearly extraterrestrial and a star can enter an underwater story.
The work draws on more than one creation narrative, including Dogon accounts involving Amma and Nommo and a Huaorani story in which stars become part of waterways and marine life. Ntjam has spoken about the value of bringing distinct sources together without claiming that they are interchangeable. Animation, photomontage, three-dimensional modelling and AI-supported image processes build a world that is visibly composite. The work does not ask viewers to mistake the resulting fiction for an ancient belief system presented intact. It offers a contemporary composition made through research, choice and transformation.
The curved screen matters because it changes how the film is encountered. A flat rectangle can still support an expansive world, but a curve begins to gather the image around the viewer. Sound comes from objects that resemble jellyfish, shifting attention from a single frontal view to an environment one moves through. The installation encourages a kind of listening that travels around the room. Story is not only what a narrator says. It is how a body receives sound and image from several directions.
Ntjam told Wallpaper that she sees science fiction as a way to project beyond categories imposed by society and to connect histories that have been lost. In the same conversation, she described Afrofuturism as research and collage. The interspecies creatures in swell of spæc(i)es invite a viewer to imagine relations that do not begin by demanding that every being fit a rigid name or border. The work's speculative freedom comes from its joining of different ways of knowing while carrying material history into the imagined world.
Family pictures, public histories
Ntjam's photomontages often begin with figures who have already fought for a future. In an ArtReview interview, she discussed reworking a painting of Toussaint Louverture holding the Haitian constitution. She placed that political image within an underwater ecosystem rather than presenting it as a self-contained tribute. Other compositions drew on Cameroonian independence fighter Elisabeth Djouka and wider links among anti-colonial movements. The technique lets a historic person remain recognisable while placing them in a network that an ordinary commemorative portrait may not show.
In the Louverture image, an underwater setting moves the constitution away from the familiar visual language of a founding document. It can suggest an afterlife for the political struggle without making the Haitian Revolution interchangeable with later fights for independence. Ntjam researches connections before she gives them a form that resists a linear account. The people and movements retain their differences even as her compositions place their struggles in relation across borders and decades.
Her family photographs bring a more intimate scale to this public history. A face preserved in a family album may carry knowledge unavailable in a state collection. It may also carry unanswered questions. Ntjam has spoken about the absence of complete records around her grandfather's life and death. Rather than disguising that uncertainty with a falsely authoritative reconstruction, she makes images that can hold incomplete memory in contact with research and invention. The resulting work can be emotionally exact without claiming documentary completeness.
This is one reason her interest in authenticity is complicated. In the NERO interview, she challenged the idea of a pure cultural origin, describing culture as moving and mixed. Her own family history crosses Cameroon, France and Germany. Her sources cross languages, continents and disciplines. The collage method does not erase those differences in the name of universal fluidity. It exposes the work of making relations among them. The joins are where a viewer can see both the possibility of connection and the artist's responsibility for how it is made.
Research as an artistic verb
The Black(s) to the Future collective is part of Ntjam's intellectual formation. She told ArtReview that the group treated Afrofuturism as a practice of research, a way of connecting dots, rather than a settled aesthetic. Workshops, shows, a festival and archival work made that approach social as well as individual. The method suggests why her own production can move from a performance in an archaeological site to a photomontage, a film or a sculptural creature without losing coherence. The continuity lies in the questions and the relations she makes among sources.
Her 2021 performance Watery Thoughts at Rome's Baths of Diocletian offers an earlier example. It was conceived in dialogue with the archaeological site and its marine imagery, bringing the memory of a place built for water into her longstanding aquatic research. The work's context required more than importing a ready-made mythology into an old building. It asked what the site already pictured, how its uses had changed, and how a contemporary performer could open those images toward other stories of migration and empire.
The move between institutions also tests the reach of her method. A Roman bath, a Stockholm photography museum and a Venice art-school space hold different expectations for an artist. Ntjam's work changes scale and medium, yet returns to a few precise operations: gather fragments, look for suppressed relations, join histories with biological and mythic forms, then make the joining visible. The resulting worlds can be exuberant, even psychedelic. Their colour and abundance are products of a disciplined process, not substitutes for one.
Ntjam has said that outer space, the ocean floor and the cave are recurring landscapes in her work. Each can shelter figures who resist power or allow them to regroup. The idea complicates the usual heroic future in which liberation happens only in the open, under full visibility. Sometimes a hidden place is where people preserve knowledge and build strength. The deep sea can be an archive, the cave a meeting place, the cosmos an exit from a world that refuses room. Her images move among these locations because no single shelter is enough.
The achievement of Ntjam's work is to make that movement felt without treating every historical wound as a premise for fantasy. Her photomontages still contain photographs of people. Her installations still draw on researched political struggles. The creatures and landscapes around them make a claim about how history might be carried forward: not as an inert monument, but as material capable of entering new relations. In Stockholm, Venice and beyond, the future she pictures grows from what has been submerged, and from the patient work of bringing it into view.