Sondi is an artist and researcher who was born in Cameroon, grew up in Germany, and now lives in the Netherlands. In her three-channel video installation Home404, Sondi explores the complex meaning of home for individuals and communities whose identities are scattered across different spaces due to immigration or displacement. While personal experiences are unique, one common element that goes with physical relocation is what Chicana writer, Gloria Anzaldúa, describes as the constant "in-betweenness," a sense of belonging that is as much psychological as it is spiritual, that in simple terms translates into a feeling of the self that is “neither from here, nor from there.” That “in-betweenness” is what Sondi’s work captures. Her title invokes the HTTP 404 "Not Found" error, which occurs when a server communicates with a browser but cannot retrieve the requested resource, for reasons such as the page being deleted or the link being broken.  Sondi uses the “Not Found” error to describe the sensorial, concrete, yet elusive nature of the experience of belonging of a person who has left the place they called home.

Home404 is divided into three parts, each representing a spirit embodied by a mask. In part I, NI MIL, we move through a synthetic world where the sunlight is reflected on sand, plants, flowers, and vestiges of architecture. Here, a female voice states: “Defined by roots and mobility, the spirit now dwells in several places at once, unable to settle anywhere. As a spirit, NI MIL travels through eternity, looking for those plagued by the loss of home, covering their eyes and enveloping them with an overwhelming feeling of incompleteness.” This evasive sense of subjectivity is embodied by the two other spirits.

Part II, ISI HI NYAN, describes the story of a stranger saved by a woman’s kindness who feeds them and provides shelter until they are well enough to continue their journey, telling stories of their land and people, until the memories become blurrier, and the line between fact and fiction gets lost. The stranger thus became a spirit, and eventually, accompanied the journey of a woman who left her own home and ended up wandering the earth alongside ISI HI NYAN. Importantly, this story reminds us of the tendency to idealize a lost home, here represented by “a perfect blue sky, an imaginary land, frozen still” that diasporic communities try to hold onto. Sondi hints that idealization, if justified by the loss, can be problematic and distance us from reality.

Part III, KUNDE, tells the story of an “Ehi,” a guardian spirit born from a human and a river, who was treated differently in her village because she looked “different.” As the story evolves, the metaphor of water functions to represent the fluidity of her identity, which starts claiming spaces, undermining other people’s sense of belonging. She becomes a spirit in peace with herself and a “safe space” to others searching for a place to belong. Together, these three videos evoke the evolving, always incomplete, and ever-changing experience of being, a subjectivity constantly called into question because of its relationship with a lost home, a 404 error. The work ends with a grounding note: “But this is not a dream at all. It is more like a memory. A memory of the place I will never forget, because it holds me onto this earth. … And as I ground myself in a space with no floor, held together by my ancestors, I know, at all times, that I belong.”

Wake Up, is the result of a collaboration between artist Isaiah Lopaz and New Past, a collective of sound artists. The song consists of a complex layering of instrumentation, including bass, drums, piano, organ, percussion, synth bass, trumpet, and vocals (Natalie Greffel, Framing Afropean Consciousness Through Music, Myth, and Imaginagency, M.A. Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2023). The lyrics, the inspiration behind Lopaz’s series of collage animations, present two different yet complementary perspectives.

First, God-like figures represent the superior being dictating behaviors and beliefs. Confidently, they tell humans: “I can do anything, I can be anything. Just watch me fly. Living is my delight; my future is so bright. I’ll never die.” Second, the chorus represents a distant observer of the unfolding story. As the song continues, gods and goddesses explain how, by adopting and even reproducing their beliefs, humans might blend in and find acceptance and love: “So let us just guide you, this unguarded space, make it a void you can fill up with numbness through our grace. So just smile, and you can make it, this could be love, and you’ll never be hated.” Here, New Past alludes to the dangers of normalizing violence toward marginalized communities. Still, there is another voice that quietly asks the deities: “What is your safety if only measured by others’ unease? What is your preference, if it depends on violent fear? What is your love if your lineage has left you numb? What do you owe your identity to?” Persistently, this voice keeps asking the last question until both voices fade out and the song ends. The lyrics serve as a reminder of how easily we can become complicit in the very systems of racism and patriarchy that already harm our own communities. Lopaz takes this complex story, animating deities and scenes with over ninety collages.

The aesthetics of the work draw from collage’s rawness, tactility, texture, layering, and fragmentation, creating a jittery movement and visual narrative that call attention to the constructed nature of both identity and belief systems. By cutting up and recontextualizing images of fashion magazines and popular culture, Lopaz moves beyond harmful stereotypes to create hybrid and mythical figures, facilitating the construction of speculative realities for Black communities. In the opening scenes, six gods and goddesses are formed with fragmented faces of black subjects, along with materials like quartz, clay vases, fabric, headscarves, and shells. As the video unfolds, other figures representing humans from different communities come into contact and at times even seem to clash or attack one another.

New Past uses silence, contrast, and moments of instrumental overload to communicate the two perspectives’ struggle to reconcile a vision made to privilege one group in detriment of others. Lopaz, in turn, gives life to these complex stories with hybrid forms that are only partially human moving across times and multidimensional spaces. By physically layering these fragmented subjects and worlds, Lopaz’s animation resonates with the song’s core: a call for collective awakening, unlearning bias, and embracing our shared duty to create solidarity within our communities.

Centering the embodied experiences of Black and queer folks, Nnenna Onuoha’s Rituals examines care as a vital tool for community growth and strength. Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker, and visual artist based in Berlin who gathered the stories of three Berliners of the African diaspora who created spaces of care and healing, despite experiencing racially motivated medical neglect.

The documentary starts with a compelling statement by Lee: “Black people find care through community here. This is absolutely my experience: care through exchanging knowledge, care through exchanging skills. Very little of the care that I have seen black people receive has actually come from medical professionals.” Lee goes on, telling their experience of systemic racism they experienced consulting with an endocrinologist in Berlin. Goitseone, another interviewee, shares the rituals she practices, like lighting candles with oils or burning sacred plants like mpepo to cleanse and connect to her ancestors when she feels down or seeks clarity on an issue. Importantly, her rituals are grounded in ancestral practices and emerged to counter the healthcare system’s built-in biases that prevented a psychologist from listening to her, and instead decided her sadness was not depression. As she explains, at one point, while she was going through “dark trenches” beyond depression, “I remember going to my doctor, and he did not believe me, and that was really hurtful. I realize how much it elongated my healing.”

Indeed, it took Goitseone three years to see a therapist.According to her, being a black and stay-at-home mom was a determining factor that prevented the health care professional she saw from doing his job. Still, she found care “mostly in black spaces,” and more importantly, she “found understanding, or better yet, a diagnosis of the proper care I need.” Caritia, the third interviewee, goes on to explain how she has created her own rituals for healing when systematic factors have resulted in medical neglect. Her rituals include workshops with others involving embodied practices like “impact play” and “sensation play” and the use of organic materials like jute ropes. Significantly, though, there is a sense of care that involves both, the collective and the individual, for as Caritia explains: “part of my care is also recognizing that I need to ask for what I want, to find what I need, to find a balance between all of the external stuff and what is actually happening to me internally.”

Listening to these stories, seeing the interviewee’s facial expressions, one can feel empathy for them and perhaps even for health care providers who might not even be aware of how their own biases prevented them from fulfilling their basic duty of care to a patient. Yet, the testimonies of Lee, Goitseone, Caritia, and the attuned work of Onuoha, does not leave us there, stuck in an unproductive place, but instead invite Black and non-binary folks to move together beyond systemic blockades, for as Lee says to their students during a yoga session in the closing scene: “You are a being of light and energy, you are allowed to take up space.” 

Finally, the last work on the programming explores the emergence of an uncanny friendship. Gali Blay & Leila Zelli’s About Dam and Hofit (2022) is a short animation in which Dam, the tip of Mount Damavand in Iran, and Hofit, an intelligence air force plane from Israel, meet and start a conversation. Since the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979, Iran and Israel have canceled diplomatic ties, both governments have sworn to attack the other as soon as the opportunity arises, and any relationship between an Iranian and an Israeli has been banned.

In a way, the film is a metaphor for the relationship between the two artists, Blay from Israel and Zelli from Iran, as it challenges its two characters to build kinship and imagine a different story for themselves beyond cultural and political conflicts. To me, the power of this animation rests precisely on the antagonism the two characters inherited; there is hope in their discovery that the structures and orientations dictating they cannot connect can be dismantled when we are open and approach each other with curiosity. Like when Hofit, the Israeli Airforce plane tries to explain why she left her home: “I want to be an anonymous airplane. A plane who travels all around the world and that can cross any kind of border, any place. Nobody knows where you’re going, where you’re from, doesn’t matter. Yeah, I want to just be me, Hofit.” “Nice to meet you Hofit. I’m Dam,” is the reply.

As the conversation continues to unfold, Blay and Zelli remind us that while it is easy to get along and close to people who look like us or think like us, the real personal work comes when we are open to starting a conversation and closing real or imaginary gaps that separate us from other people. “Do you feel free in this in-between?” asks Dam. “I feel free to imagine things the way I want to, and not how others want me to imagine them.” About Dam and Hofit can resemble a story about anyone who has decided to move past prejudices. As the video programming runs while a war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran unfolds, the conversation between Dam and Hofit takes a more urgent dimension.