Rush Hour: Unraveling Across Temporal Distortions
A choreographic sculptural study of topography through its spectral characteristics, prioritizing traces and residue as material evidence. It translates environmental research into kinetic movements to express how states of exile inscribe onto the body. The work’s central mechanism, a miniature, remote-controlled train, is the protagonist and a spectral remainder. Choreography is structured inside, around, and in response to this apparatus, following the rhythm and repetition of a ticking clock that eventually breaks into a glitch. As a guiding force, the moving train reorients and dislocates the audience within a cyclical framework that challenges the fixed temporal conditions of the historical document. The use of technology in the work produces a meditation on uncertainty and failure, to question who is allowed to retell history. Sankofa is an Akan principle that translates to "go back and fetch it." In the work, it becomes a call back to revisit history in order to remember. Pairing it with the concept of self reference, which relays that information is more accessible when it relates to our self, becomes a way to invoke the power of memory as a legitimizing tool. Unbound by the conditions of an inhabitable environment, memory grants us access to our ancestral knowledge systems by way of oral traditions preserved through folkloric practices. Lorna Simpson's Waterbearer (1986) is a map key in the work. In the image, the subject carries an antiquated vessel made of steel in one hand and a plastic water gallon in another. Her back towards us as she is caught in between timelines and geographic imprints in a perpetual balancing act, tipping the scales one way or another. The caption of the piece reads “SHE SAW HIM DISAPPEAR BY THE RIVER. THEY ASKED HER TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED. ONLY TO DISCOUNT HER MEMORY.” The image points to how the black feminine subjective voice is historically discredited or erased which is a notion I use to question the recursive tempo of history.
40 mins performance with interactive video projection, sculptures and live poetry
Directed, choreographed and performed by Marcelline Mandeng
dimensions variable
2025HAPTICS: In Full Bloom
An immersive installation that merges video, sculpture, sound, live matter, and smell into a modular stage for performance. The project transforms the gallery into a multi-sensory cave, an archeological, mythic, and domestic space that interweaves body and place with geography and narrative. Rooted in a relationship between archeological voids, human orifices, and data as material origins, the installation interrogates transformations across time, scale, and memory. The body is a vessel of genealogical data; its shadow is an archive of ancestral confluence in the unconscious. It parallels the role of caves as repositories of history, where data fragments comprise collective memory. The installation reflects on the interface between physical and digital archives: the flesh as a system of information and data as its evolving counterpart. By integrating myth and technology, the project interrogates personal and collective narratives across time and species. The gallery becomes a hybrid space merging domestic and sacral architecture, informed by the aesthetics of geological and digital topographies. Walls are painted with pigments derived from my rich, darker skin tones to reflect the geology of weathered rock formations.
65 mins performance with interactive video projection, sculptures and live poetry Directed and Choreographed by Marcelline Mandeng Nken Additional performers: Creighton Baxter + Yacine Fall dimensions variable 2024 Underwater Shrine
a video performance shown at The Kitchen in October 2021, part of Moor Mother's record release event for her project Black Encyclopedia of the Air. An abstraction of Disney's story of the Little Mermaid, primarily using materials like fruits and sound, which are elementally suspended between liquid and solid states. Varying elevations and liminal spaces convey her yearning to complete her metamorphosis to experience romantic love. I reimagine Ariel from The Little Mermaid as an avatar imbued with personal agency while exploring the ritual of shape-shifting as a form of feminine sacrifice. Between land and water, where she exists, she becomes a metaphor for what it means to be perceived as both human and animal or monstrous.
16 mins performance with interactive video projection and surreal objects Directed, choreographed and performed by Marcelline Mandeng Nken dimensions variable 2021
Le Coup Au Cœur (From Magritte To Pope.L )
A reimagined Saint Sebastian substituting arrows for 100 roses. I drew from the duality of the flower as a symbol of enduring beauty and a tool of mediumship through actions underscoring the virtue of sacrifice as an emotional connective tissue that builds the muscle of empathy. Crawling on my back through a field of a 100 roses, an unspoken homage to Pope L, performed to evoke the frequency underground through the swamp symbolism of growth through decay.
16 mins performance with 100 roses Directed, choreographed and performed by Marcelline Mandeng Nken dimensions variable 2024