Sonsbeek 20–24
In this 2021 performance Hadassa directly confronted the bureaucratic erasure she discovered in her grandmother's 1960s identity card, which reduced her occupation to a single, limiting word: "married".
This official record stood in stark contrast to her grandmother's life in the 'Bas-Fleuve' district, where she was a respected dignitary endowed with important functions under Congolese customary law. She was actively involved in the reciprocal economy: cultivating the soil, raising goats, and negotiating with merchants, and sharing her breeding expertise with her employees.
Ngamba viewed this as a powerful example of the "colonial library's suppression of identity". To counter this historical flattening, the artist embodied a new, empowered identity through ritual gestures, showing that personal memory cannot be confined to written records
Photography by Dani Gherca
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