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"Home 404"
 Sondi

Sondi "Home 404" Video stills by Sondi, "Home 404", courtesy of the artist

Home 404 is a reconstruction of memories from Sondi’s home in Cameroon and is inspired by rituals that are embodied as masks inhabited by spirits. The video installation is an imaginative and visual memoir of “home” suggesting it could be a non-space that is dynamic and in flux, constructed by history, language, culture, music, time, and, above all, memory.

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 elementthat 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.

Text by Erandy Vergara Vargas

Home404 is a reconstruction of memories from Sondi’s home in Cameroon and is inspired by rituals that are embodied as masks inhabited by spirits. The installation is an imaginative and visual memoir of “home” suggesting it could be a non-space that is dynamic and in flux, constructed by history, language, culture, music, time, and, above all, memory. This fluidity of home and identity is emphasized by the constant movement of the digital landscape. Objects and spaces appear and disappear, transform and metamorphose, pointing to the fragmented and subjective nature of memories. The result is a virtual dreamscape that explores diasporic identities and memories that resound in the physical space, the digital space, and, suggests Sondi, the non-space—or the imaginative space in which the non-space exists. Home 404 creates in this way a hybridity that is filled with new modes of being, in which the imagination becomes a tool for liberation.

Sondi "Home 404" Part 1

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. | Video stills Home404, courtesy of the artist

Sondi "Home 404" Part 2

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. | Video stills by Sondi, "Home 404", courtesy of the artist

Sondi "Home 404" Part 2

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.” | Video stills by Sondi, "Home 404", courtesy of the artist


 

Sondi

Sondi

Sondi | © Angelina Nikolayeva

Sondi (she/her) is an artist and researcher from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands. Her practice centers on worldbuilding and worlding, particularly within digital spaces and video games. She examines how power and narrativesoperatewithin virtual environments, tracing encoded biases, algorithmic discrimination, game mechanics, and the portrayal of people, places, and ecologies, while crafting worlds that foreground marginalised voices and perspectives often excluded from our techno-futures.