Josèfa Ntjam & Sean Hart, Mélas de Saturne, 11’20min, 2020

Mélas de Saturne is the point of departure for a display which tests the potential meta-narratives in the formation of new collective memories and ecologies. Ntjam’s speculative analysis of the mélas – a black liquid infiltrating and disrupting established systems of perceptions and nominations of fixed (id)entities – and trans-historical aesthetics as tools for a practice of emancipation, deconstructing and reinventing the concept of origin to promote the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities.

Mélas de Saturne is the title of a new film which explores melancholia – deriving from the Greek melankholía, meaning “blackness of the bile”, from mélas ‘black, dark, murky’ – as a generative force deployed across the internet(s). Intertwining reflections on mythology, cosmology and science, Ntjam’s film projects the viewer into a virtual territory at the confluence between the oceans’ abysses and the darknet, where a fictional character called ‘Persona’ embarks in an initiatory journey in search for algorithmic origins, hoped to be found among the Meta population living in North-East Cameroon.