Hadassa Ngamba

Ngamba’s practice unfolds as a dialogue between art, science, history, and ancestral knowledge systems. Moving seamlessly across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media such as Extended Reality (XR), she explores the intertwined themes of power, memory, and reciprocity. Beginning with her early Cerveau and Perspective series, she probes both her family’s history and the colonial history of Congo. Her work not only confronts the enduring legacies of colonialism but also envisions alternative futures for Congo—futures grounded in equity, exchange, and creative renewal. 

 

Trained in criminology, Ngamba approaches her subjects with forensic precision, dissecting the colonial infrastructures—maps, borders, and trade routes—that continue to shape African societies. She reveals how cartography functioned as a tool of domination and extraction, exposing the epistemic violence embedded in the colonial archive. Drawing on V. Y. Mudimbe’s concept of the Bibliothèque coloniale, she illuminates the systematic erasure of African intellectual traditions. Her art thus becomes a counter-archive: a gesture of epistemic restitution and justice that links intellectual sovereignty to material and economic emancipation. 

 

In her paintings, Ngamba grounds this philosophy in her materials. She grinds Congolese minerals—malachite, cobalt, coltan, and cassiterite—into pigments, transforming these ores into living agents that carry the memory of the land. By reclaiming them as color rather than commodity, she reconfigures instruments of exploitation into messengers of beauty, emotion, and history. These recent works transcend colonial critique, opening new frontiers of material and spiritual expression. 

 

Reciprocity—the conceptual core of Ngamba’s practice—animates her ongoing project Trajet Ngamba (Pathway Ngamba). This initiative seeks to reactivate ancient African trade routes and knowledge systems, embodying reciprocity as both method and philosophy. Through collaborations such as the Trajet Ngamba Coffee Edition, developed with Bamiléké dignitaries, the project experiments with sustainable models of exchange. At once artwork, economic model, and philosophical proposition, Trajet Ngamba proposes that culture and commerce can coexist in mutual benefit rather than exploitation. 

 

This ethos of reciprocity extends to her sculptural and performative works. Inspired by fungi and mycorrhizal networks of mutual aid and communication, Ngamba explores symbiosis as metaphor and method. In her bronze sculpture series, she fuses fungal forms with stamps used in Edition Café packaging. These hybrid objects function as both symbols and tools, uniting art, ritual, and commerce within a shared ecosystem. 

 

Ngamba’s artistic universe bridges the material and the digital, the ancestral and the scientific, the visual and performative. Following a visit at CERN, she began the Feynman Lithography Series, merging diagrams of elementary particles with royal Mphoo headdresses from the ancient Kongo kingdoms. This synthesis brings together two symbolic systems: one mapping the invisible forces of matter, the other embodying royal authority and lineage. Ngamba posits an epistemological parity between scientific inquiry and ancestral symbolism—two intricate languages for describing reality. Through immersive XR environments, she makes colonial architectures accessible, transforming digital space into a site of agency where technology becomes a means of reclamation rather than exploitation. In a series of performances she reanimates ancient rituals - like the Kikumbi ritual - thereby demonstrating that they are pertinent for the present. 

 

Underlying this multifaceted practice is Ngamba’s evolving thinking on African Intelligence— art-based research that bridges ancestral wisdom with contemporary science and materiality with technology.