Jota Mombaça lowered cloth into water and let the water mark it. The material returned carrying sediment, a record made without a photographer's fixed frame. In The Sinking Ship/Prosperity, an exhibition at KADIST in San Francisco, the artist brought such altered fabric into a room with sound, video and a structure that suggested a whale's ribs. The cloth had travelled through a lagoon; other pieces entered three sites around San Francisco Bay. They did not emerge clean. Their stains and weights were part of the work.
Water can be made into a simple symbol for migration or memory. Mombaça gives it a more active role. It touches a material, changes it and refuses to leave the same mark twice. The artist has described the work as a practice of sinking, not merely an image of disaster. A future can begin when the solid arrangements of the present lose their claim to permanence. What comes back from immersion is not restored to a prior state. It has another history attached to it.
Born in Natal, Brazil, Mombaça works between Lisbon and Amsterdam, according to their gallery biography. They move among poetry, performance, installation and visionary fiction. Their writing has engaged Octavia Butler, and an earlier artist biography named Afrofuturism among their interests. The more exact frame for the work is the artist's own insistence on a future that does not proceed neatly from the colonial present. In a long interview with Gama, Mombaça describes an urgent futurism that works against linear time. It is not a promise that progress will arrive on schedule. It is a way to live when the world's familiar terms have already failed many of its inhabitants.
A ship that will not stay afloat
The KADIST exhibition announcement describes a large sculptural installation built in stages from 2022 into early 2023. Sound and video joined the fabric pieces, and performances activated the space over time. The work was never only a single finished object installed before visitors entered. It changed as material arrived, was placed and encountered other material. The exhibition's own duration became part of its form.
At its centre, Ghost 0 used a long stretch of cotton that had been submerged in a Venetian lagoon and dried with sediment in its folds. The KADIST exhibition announcement describes the fabric resting on a steel armature resembling whale ribs. The rib form evokes an absent body without supplying an illustration of an animal. It can also suggest a vessel's interior, skeletal and vulnerable. The cloth, meanwhile, carries physical evidence of a place it has passed through.
Three further linen sculptures were placed in waters at separate sites around San Francisco Bay before joining the exhibition, according to KADIST. These waters are not interchangeable. The Venetian lagoon and San Francisco Bay touch different histories of trade, movement and loss. Mombaça uses the same basic action across them, but the materials return with particular marks. The repetition makes difference visible. A viewer is asked to look at fabric that has undergone an event, rather than at a representation of an event painted on its surface.
The exhibition's title brings two states into tension. A ship sinks; prosperity is often imagined as upward movement, accumulation and safe passage. The slash between them does not resolve which will prevail. The artist's use of water reaches into the history of the Atlantic crossing and contemporary environmental damage without claiming that one artwork can contain all those histories. The fabric can register immersion. It cannot speak for every life lost at sea. That limit is part of its gravity.
Mombaça has worked with water as a force that undoes language as well as objects. A poem included with the KADIST announcement imagines water holding sounds and codes even as it dissolves them. The short passage is not a caption telling the viewer exactly what the sculptures mean. It sets up a relation between what remains and what cannot be recovered intact. The installation makes that relation tangible: a dried fold holds a mark, while the immersion that produced it can no longer be repeated exactly.
The sound and video expand the encounter beyond the visible cloth. They give the room another sense of time. A moving image can show duration; a sound can occupy a visitor even when their eyes are elsewhere. The artist's gallery lists Waterwill as a video documenting sinking processes in Venice, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Those places make the project a route across waters rather than an isolated sculptural effect. Each location offers a different meeting between a body, fabric and a shoreline.
Mombaça's work is attentive to the fact that a route is never available to everyone under equal conditions. The Atlantic's waters carry the history of slavery and forced movement. Today's seas and borders carry other forms of exclusion. The installation does not reproduce a ship in order to make those histories comprehensible at a glance. It asks the viewer to stay with material that has been touched by water and with the unequal systems through which bodies continue to move.
The swamp as a measure of time
In 2023, Mombaça developed A Certain Death/The Swamp in Berlin. The Gulbenkian Foundation's account describes ceramic rain catchers submerged for a month at the bottom of a lake, then retrieved with the water's traces. Mud appeared to encroach on the exhibition space. Clay impressions hung above the floor with marks that were mostly unreadable. The artist made a room in which earth and water seemed to be entering together.
A rain catcher is a useful name for an object that waits. Its purpose depends on weather that cannot be ordered to arrive. Mombaça's version underwent another duration under the lake. The vessel came back carrying evidence of immersion in its surface and shape. Waiting here is not passivity. It is an exposure to a force that changes the object even when the artist cannot see every moment of the change.
The foundation's essay connects this work to the time of the transatlantic slave trade and to geological time. These scales are hard to hold together in a conventional historical image. One records human exploitation across centuries; the other measures changes that can exceed a person's lifespan. The artist's month-long immersion offers a smaller, graspable duration within that immense field. An object goes down, time passes and it returns altered. The action cannot stand for the whole history. It gives a bodily measure of time's material effects.
The suspended clay prints carry mostly unreadable markings. A separate work in the exhibition, untitled (yes, i am afraid), is a charcoal and powder drawing on paper mounted on a metal frame. Its legible admission of fear meets the clay prints' resistance to quick decoding. The visitor receives one clear human response within a field of uncertain signs. Mombaça's work does not require a heroic subject who meets catastrophe without trembling. The drawing carries that fear; the ceramic rain catchers carry the lake's traces. Another distinct work, anticipation (at dawn), is a charcoal-and-oil painting on canvas. Each material records a different encounter with the exhibition's unsettled ground.
In a 2022 conversation with Gama, Mombaça says the modern idea of the future can itself dispossess people of futurity. Progress has often been narrated from a colonial vantage point, with some lives treated as the cost of another group's advance. A swamp resists that clean direction. It holds matter in suspension, receives water and makes paths uncertain. The form is not a fantasy of returning to an untouched nature. It is a way of feeling how the ground changes under an apparently settled world.
The artist's use of mud and clay also unsettles the division between a finished artwork and the conditions that produced it. A museum often promises controlled surfaces and stable displays. Here, a vessel bears the record of time outside the museum, and the room appears threatened by material from the ground. The work asks a viewer to look at process without mistaking it for a lack of form. Its form is precisely the arrangement of vessels, marks, suspension and encroachment.
The near future
Mombaça has also made a work titled 2021 with muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi in 2019. In the Gama interview, the artist connects that project to a text that projected toward 2021 while it was still two years away. The choice of date mattered. It was close enough to feel like an impending present, rather than an abstract science-fiction century. The future had become a threat and a condition already arriving.
Mombaça calls the method urgent futurism. They describe a trap for linear time: a way to recognise that a world may already be ending for some people while others still speak of its uninterrupted progress. The work does not need a distant planet to produce estrangement. It places a year just ahead of the viewer and asks what has become possible to see there. The distance is small, but the shift in perspective can be large.
The collaborative authorship of 2021 matters. Mattiuzzi made the work with Mombaça, and its future was not one person's private prediction. The project grew beside Mombaça's writing, carrying an argument into a shared artistic act. The artist's later water projects take a different route through time, letting objects undergo a physical interval rather than naming a year. Both approaches interrupt the idea that the future is an empty space waiting for the same old story to continue.
In the Gama interview, Mombaça speaks of poetry as a means by which possibility takes form. That is not a claim that language alone can undo violence. It is an insistence that imagination is one of the resources available to people already confronting the limits of a brutal world. A sentence can hold a condition open long enough for a different action to be considered. A performance can put the sentence in a room with other bodies. A vessel can let weather write a trace beside it.
Mombaça's writing has read Butler's Parable novels through this problem of threatened futurity. A scholarly account of their work cites the artist's discussion of Lauren Olamina sensing the approaching collapse in the signs of her present. The useful connection is not a simple comparison between fictional disaster and contemporary life. It is a method of attention. A speculative character reads what is already changing and acts before a safer observer agrees that change is real.
This is why Mombaça's futures are often material rather than illustrative. The cloth in a lagoon, the rain catcher under a lake and the mud moving across a room all register time through contact. A title such as 2021 makes temporal pressure explicit. The artist moves among those forms because no single image can describe the different ways a future may be denied, feared or made.
Land after return
At Lisbon's MAAT, Mombaça presented work in Black Ancient Futures, an exhibition that included artists from Africa and its diasporas. An El País interview at the museum describes Seu Sangue É Terra Que Ninguém Pisa, a video in which the artist's acts of burial become rituals of return. Mombaça speaks there about seeking a relation to earth that is not simply a return to a nation state. The work joins the matter of a body to ground while keeping migration and displacement in view.
The artist's gallery lists the video as a 2024 work, separate from the watery installations. Its title binds blood and earth through a sentence that sounds protective and exposed at once. In the Lisbon account, burial is not presented as surrender to death. It becomes an attempt to make contact with a place beyond the administrative identities that regulate who may cross a border or belong. The camera records a ritual that remains the artist's act, rather than claiming to resolve the problems that brought it into being.
The relationship to The Sinking Ship/Prosperity is formal. Water takes cloth into itself and returns it marked; earth receives a body in an enacted return. Both elements can carry history without giving it back as a clean story. Neither offers the simple comfort of a recovered homeland. The artist's work asks what can be made through contact with a place when the political structures governing that contact remain unequal.
Mombaça has described their practice through anticolonial critique, gender disobedience and visionary fiction. These are not decorative ideas placed over neutral objects. They change the work's time and material choices. A vessel waits under water; a year approaches before it has officially arrived; a body meets ground without asking a state to certify the meaning of return. Each act tests an inherited rule about whose future counts and what form that future must take.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams editorial stages a future for the Democratic Republic of Congo through a Stockholm fashion shoot and conversations with people connected to the country. Mombaça's work takes the question of who can picture a future into the textures of clay, fabric, rain and voice. The histories and artistic means are distinct, but both works ask what becomes possible when an inherited account of the present is no longer treated as the only one.
The cloth never becomes a perfect archive of its journey. The rain catcher cannot preserve every moment spent in the lake. The earth of a filmed ritual cannot be lifted whole into a gallery. Mombaça gives these limits a form and lets them work. A future is not a clean copy of a past finally repaired. It may be a changed object, a remembered fear, a route across water or an act that makes the ground feel newly available. The work asks a viewer to stay with those partial returns and to hear possibility in what they could not keep intact.