CA VIENT DE LA RUE is a community music prevention project created by Jail Time Records to support vulnerable youth in Douala, Cameroon. In response to rising youth violence, gang activity, and drug abuse, the project uses music as a tool for prevention, creativity, and social reintegration.

Through a mobile recording studio traveling across Douala’s neighborhoods over 12 months, the initiative discovers and mentors young talent through street sessions, freestyle performances, and professional music production. Selected participants receive training in music and sound engineering, while each stage of the journey is documented through videos and music releases.

The Eden Project is an initiative that transforms prison spaces through art and mural painting. Created inside the death sentence quarter of the Central Prison of Douala New Bell, the project brought together inmates and artists for a one-month workshop led by visual artist, painter, and JTR co-founder Dione Roach alongside the prison’s collective of painters.

Together, they covered the walls of death row with large-scale murals inspired by gardens, forests, and natural landscapes, offering a glimpse of nature to prisoners who may never experience it again outside the prison walls. In 2025, the initiative expanded to repaint another section of the prison known as the “Texas.”

The Eden Project explores how art can reconnect people with humanity inside spaces of extreme confinement. By bringing images of nature into prison, the project creates moments of escape, reflection, and connection to nature within places often defined by isolation and violence. Rooted in the belief that beauty can transform even the harshest spaces, the initiative uses murals as a way to restore a sense of life, imagination, and emotional openness where it is most needed.

Jail Time Records promotes all kinds of artistic expression and talent, working both with painters and artisans inside the prison. As well as organising painting workshops and supplying art material to those who have a passion for the visual arts, we are working with a number of artisans such as jewellers, embroiderers and weavers to produce original and unique hand-made objects made-in-prison that will be soon be for sale to support the artisans activities and help them to make a living through their craft.

An immersive three-channel video and sound installation by Jail Time Records for the Cameroon National Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia 61st International Art Exhibition

The installation unfolds across three channels of moving image and spatialized sound, constructing an immersive environment that oscillates between the indoor carceral space of Douala’s New Bell prison and the vast aqueous expanses of the Wouri River and its surrounding estuaries.

The work inhabits this threshold between confinement and fluidity. Within the prison, sound operates as a speculative architecture, music as pulse, as breath, as a heartbeat that exceeds walls. Imagination and longing become forms of mobility, while artistic production opens temporary apertures beyond the fixity of incarceration. The installation positions sound not merely as accompaniment, but as an elemental force: a carrier of memory, desire, and psychic displacement.

Counterpointing the interiority of the prison is the Wouri River, the spiritual axis of Douala and its people. Each year, during the Ngondo ceremony, ancestral presences are invoked through ritual engagement with the water, reactivating a cosmological relationship between land, lineage, and the living community. In Naya, a red figure traverses these aquatic landscapes. At once spectral and embodied, the figure evokes the dream-state of freedom, the Ngondo spirit, and the sedimented histories embedded within the river’s currents.

By weaving together carceral space, riverine cosmology, and colonial history, Naya proposes an immersive meditation on captivity and transcendence, memory and futurity. The installation does not resolve these tensions; rather, it sustains them, allowing sound, water, and the moving body to become conduits through which alternative forms of belonging and freedom might be sensed, if only momentarily.