Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work is driven by the vibration of continuities. Her gesture does not start from a fixed point, but from a trail that insists on crossing. Body, earth, and sound are not separated; they move in reciprocity. The artist inscribes herself in this current, dealing with the legacy as a field of forces – not a static archive, but a grammar of trajectories. At the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she presents an immersive installation that interweaves video, rhythm, and textile materials, creating a circular territory where time is not fixed but spirals within a pulsating, ever-changing fabric.
Fawundu operates from the Lukasa and the Dikenga, symbolic devices of the Luba and Kongo peoples. The Lukasa, a sophisticated memory support, not only preserves stories but also reactivates them through its textures and reliefs. The Dikenga, a Bakongo cosmogram, expresses the cyclicality of existence, in which matter and flow do not follow Western linearity, but fold and unfold. Beatriz Nascimento reminds us that the permanence of Black worlds is marked by the invention of new territorialities – places where experience is a horizon in continuous recomposition.
Fawundu’s textile collages, meditations on our past, present, and future, are constructed with materials manipulated by communities in Congo, Brazil, Nigeria, and her ancestral home, Sierra Leone. Her creative process unfolds through deep engagement with archives that honor Indigenous intelligence and histories of resistance. As she moves through water and across land, she gathers materials – each carrying its own story. The remnants of this journey – drinking water sachets, fragments of conversation, shells, and healing herbs – are woven into the fabric as embodied testimonies of exchange, transformed into marks of evocation and acts of fabrication.
At the Bienal, the artist invites viewers into a meditative space, where layers of textile narratives and audiovisual records unfold. Fawundu collaborates with quilombola communities and local artists to explore the subtle ways Luba, Kongo, and Yoruba systems persist in Bahia. These ancestral retentions are expressed through gestural embodiment in her video works, revealing layers of cultural memory and spiritual continuity. Her participation in the Bienal is a call to tune in to ancestral and cosmic rhythms – a choreography of forces where earth, pulse, and trajectory vibrate in harmony.
