Ghost 1: Drowning is not a poem but is not not a poem either

2022 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

1005.84 x 144.78 cm

Jota Mombaça

---

Ghost 1: Drowning is not a poem but is not not a poem either by Jota Mombaça is part of a series of sculptures exploring water’s restless, elemental properties and what the artist describes as “the radicality of sinking”. For this project, Mombaça produced three sculptural linen works in collaboration with the waters of the San Francisco Bay (in Berkeley), the San Pablo Bay (in Richmond), and the Pacific Ocean (in Bolinas), wherein the artist submerged linen in these local waters for three to seven weeks, then dried, and installed the materials on metal armatures. Mombaça’s subsequent video waterwill (2023) is composed of various footage from the sinking, floating, and unsinking of these sculptures and those from previous connected performances. Mombaça installed the artworks in stages, activated and animated by a public conversation (with art critic and philosopher Darla Migan), a performance titled Grieving Time (2022), and a publication of drawings and poetry that serve as guides for performances. For the performance, Mombaça dismantled one of the linen sculptures and nourished the tattered and dried linen pieces with ocean water collected from Bolinas, reciprocating the process that produced it. Through poetry, performance and sculpture, the artist frames this constellation of works as a reimagining of new cartographies of language, action, and movement to procure what Mombaça calls the “redistribution of trauma.” As such, this work speaks to what might be gleaned about decolonialism and combating climate change by observing and listening to the water.

---

Interdisciplinary and “non-disciplinary” artist Jota Mombaça (pronouns: she/they) defines themselves as a nonbinary travesti of color, Latin American slang that has been reappropriated by transfeminist activists and subjects as a local, political, gender identity. The term reflects the artist’s interest in the tensions between desires for opacity and drives toward self-preservation as experienced by radicalized trans artists. Mombaça’s work stems from poetry, critical theory, queer studies, political intersectionality, anti-colonial justice, and the redistribution of violence. Their artistic research engages both the continuing traumas of the Transatlantic slave trade and the rapidly increasing impact of climate crisis. Driven by the tensions of these urgent subjects, their work traverses topics such as displacement, environmental racism, gender disobedience, and time travel. Mombaça’s earlier work investigated the relationship between monstrosity and humanity and the tensions between ethics, aesthetics, art, and politics in the knowledge productions of the global south. Through performance, critical fabulations, and situational strategies of knowledge production, the artist speculates on what comes after we dislodge the modern-colonial subject from its podium.

---

Colors:

---

• colonialism.n.01
• performance.n.01
• language.n.01
• motion.n.03
• poetry.n.01