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.