Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Their work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennale (2016 and 2020/2021), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and the 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019).
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Hans Ulrich ObristAny miracles today?
Jota MombaçaI shed a tear and, as it ran across my face, I remembered the river that crosses my favorite square in the city where I grew up. The miracle is the river crying through my eyes; it is the glimpse of inseparability that constitutes this moment; it is the elemental possession that occurs whenever tears are shed; and it is the aberrant geomorphology of diasporic tears.
HUODo you write poems?
JMI do.
HUOHow would you like to die?
JMOn a beautiful day.
HUOThe future is . . . ?
JMDefinitely confusing.
HUODoes money corrupt art?
JMI wouldn’t say it corrupts, for that would imply that art stands on a pure moral ground, and I don’t agree with that. My impression is that art is always already corrupted, formed and deformed by the very conditions through which it emerges. Art is never separated from power, speculation, interest, and possibility; and although it can extrapolate frameworks and enable experiments on what is not yet, art will always emerge in relation. What money does is extract from art—as it does with basically everything that exists within late-capitalist planetary reality.
HUOWhat is your unrealized project?
JMTo spend time underwater.
HUOAre there any quotes you live by?
JMThere are many, but I now recall two: one from Lauren Olamina’s radical teleology in Octavia Butler’s Parable series—“There is no end to what a living world will demand of you”—and the other from Esotérico, a beautiful song composed by Gilberto Gil: “Mistério sempre há de pintar por aí” (Mystery will always come around).
HUOAre we these images?
JMI hope not.