About the work:

“Yes, I am afraid” (2024) is a silkscreen print based on a unique drawing made with charcoal and pigment on paper. The drawing was created for the artist’s solo exhibition A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP at CCA Berlin in September 2023. It is set amidst a dystopian environment composed of clay prints, metal frames, muddy soil, paintings, ceramics, video and sound. Each element embodies a facet of the total climate the exhibition seeks to evoke, channeling the violence and (re)generative force of water, swamp and rainstorm to reveal the deep connection between the systemic brutality of colonialism and the disproportionate impacts of climate change across geopolitical borders. 

In this context, “Yes, I am afraid” serves as a focal point of expression, both verbally and visually. The frantic, stuttering repetition of the phrase resembles a cry echoed by countless bodies, united by their bold admission of fear in the face of planetary crisis, and their mutual recognition of each other’s vulnerability and incompleteness. As a stand-alone work, “Yes, I am afraid” plays with the legibility of text and the gesture of writing, offering a polyrhythmic score to thicken the meanings of language and its (in)capacity to convey emotion. “Yes, I am afraid” poses an open question at the heart of Jota Mombaça’s artistic practice: Could a shared anxiety of annihilation prepare the ground for the emergence of a shared hope?

About the artist:

Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds from poetry, critical theory, queer studies, political intersectionality, anticolonial justice, and the redistribution of violence. Mombaça defines herself as a trans racialized bicha, born and raised in Natal, in the northeast of Brazil. In recent years, Mombaça has been investigating 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 intends to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and speculate on what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium. Her work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 59th Biennale de Venezia (2022), the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennales (2016 and 2020/2021), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), and the 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019), and as part of exhibitions and programs organized by Serpentine Galleries, London; Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Madre Napoli; de Appel, Amsterdam; and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She is currently working at Free University Berlin with a scholarship from Stiftung Mercator.