Jota Mombaça: ‘I’m a Huge Octavia Butler Nerd’

At Rockbund Art Museum, an unusual opera is taking place across the gallery’s third, fourth and fifth floors. Set in the aftermath of an ambiguous catastrophe, it’s sung by termite-mound-like heaps of clay, sand and sawdust. Its protagonist, She, finds herself surrounded by Choir, a “collective character” embodied in nine mineral forms that become an unsettled, spatially distributed chorus. Together they create a relational ecology, in which the visitor is also invited to participate.  

Mombaça lives and works between Natal, Brazil, and Almada, Portugal. Her work for the Rockbund exhibition draws on the vernacular building techniques of north and north-eastern Brazil, forms of dwelling shaped over time by their racialised and subjugated inhabitants. The opera, stuck in movement (in the tide), grew from Mombaça’s 2023 text of the same title, written in a moment where political agency felt impossible to recover. Three years later, the text has been reimagined in operatic form to ask how one might uncouple humanity from authority, and to better listen to a world beyond the human.  

Nell Whittaker: How did you first encounter opera? 

Jota Mombaça: Many of my projects have dealt with the limits of visuality, and sound is a much more direct way into feeling. I was informed by artists like Gabrielle Goliath, who works with the operatic form completely outside of linear drama. But I have an obsession with vocalists and singers. Every time I meet a singer who I like, I tell them: “It’s really dangerous for me to be around you. If you tell me to do anything, I’ll do it, just because of the power of your voice.” 

NW: This show in Rockbund grew from a poem that’s now around three years old. Can you tell me about the life of that poem? 

JM: Around 2020, I stopped taking writing commissions. Writing critically was messing with my visual arts practice—I couldn’t make a line on a piece of paper without thinking, “What does it mean?” In order to try to stop overthinking, I quit writing. But the funny thing is, I started to write poems, in which I was thinking about what kind of communication can develop between human languages and bodies of water. After I published the text, I had the opportunity of doing one or two projects in which I invited singers to read it together and to vocalise around it. The text started to become a seed that the process nurtured. It’s about a character who we named “She”, and she’s living through some sort of transition. It’s as if she died but, instead of ceasing to exist, she became a geological entity. She’s trying to figure that out.  

NW: Is this what you call “redecomposition”? 

JM: Yes. It’s a term that was articulated by Denise Ferreira da Silva, a Brazilian philosopher based in the US, and a great friend. At the elemental level, we are all redecompositions of the same components. I’m oversimplifying da Silva’s philosophical stance but, for me, it is like a methodology, or some sort of guide, in terms of how to work. I’m super interested in the idea of free redecomposition, meaning that things are composed and decomposed and redecomposed constantly. My technique is really composition: staying present and keeping the relational field open so things can be adjusted, adapted, remixed and reorganised as we go. I think that comes from the fact that I’m a performer.  

“I was thinking about what kind of communication can develop between human languages and bodies of water”

NW: What’s the relationship between capital and clay? 

JM: To think of clay as a mineral connects it with mineral existence in general, and a planet that is completely exhausted because capital production insists on extraction. When I started experimenting with ceramics, I was trying to rush the process, and then the clay would fall apart. I had to learn to accept that I’m not in control. I also struggle with the expectation of the art system that I should frame myself as some sort of master or genius. I don’t like to think about myself like this. I am resistant to the idea that I have domain over matter. So the relationship between capital and clay is produced by the idea that capital exists so as to mould clay, and clay is a passive entity to be formed as per capitalist desire. But clay wants the time it needs, it wants water, it wants air. What capital does is to deny that very basic element of agency, because it doesn’t want to consider any other imperative other than its own. But the imperative of the planet is a relational one. 

NW: What does genre—sci-fi, fantasy, apocalypse—mean to you? 

JM: I’m a huge Octavia Butler nerd, and that has greatly informed my practice. There’s a moment in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series (1987–1989) where the main character wakes up in a cell, and she doesn’t understand where she is. She only remembers the 1980s, so she’s like, “Have I been kidnapped by Russia?” Then she realises that there’s someone in the cell with her, and that this other person is a different species. She decides: “Whatever I witness, I will deal with as reality.” That’s what sci-fi allowed me to do, too: whatever I experience, I can frame as a form of reality. I was recently reading a beautiful book by an Indigenous anthropologist from X. Her father taught her about the cosmological structure of her society, which could be read as mythology, but during the book the anthropologist consistently writes, “I don’t want you to read that as a myth, I want you to read that as a register of reality.” I’m interested in thinking through genres like fantasy, folklore, myth and sci-fi, as potential registers of reality. I started to study science fiction back in 2016, when there was a coup in Brazil against Dilma Rousseff. We did a workshop at the Sāo Paulo Art Biennial and I invited Walidah Imarisha—an activist and writer from the US who coined the term “speculative visionary fiction”—to give a world-building workshop. We imagined a world in which the billionaires had left the planet, taking all the water with them, and we had to imagine what tools we could use to respond. I imagined this character who transitioned, who took hormones, so she could breathe under the earth. By doing that, she could search for water. That possibility gave me life because I was thinking, I can’t do anything—we can’t even protest right now because of new anti-terrorism laws. But when we went to a world much harder than the one we had, we also could imagine tools that we were not seeing there. When I came back to my own political reality, I had more breathing space. 

Jota Mombaça, stuck in movement (in the tide) (31 October 2026–21 February 2027) at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 

Main image: Jota Mombaça_,The Muted Saints_ (2025). Photo: Pedro Yared Lima.