Floodgate. Marcelline Mandeng Nken

FLOODGATE: A Visual Mixtape is a video collage by Marcelline Mandeng Nken that meditates on the spiritual and political dimensions of gender variance across pre-colonial Africa. Composed as a series of nine technopoems or hybrid compositions of sound, image, text and archival material, the installation draws inspiration from Burkinabè author Sobonfu Somé’s ‘The Spirit of Intimacy’, a book that illuminates the role of the gatekeeper and the impact of intimate relationships within the fabric of her native village.

In Dagara cosmology, the gatekeeper lives on the margins of the village. A figure revered for their queerness and unconventional ways of being, they are called to perform metaphysical acts to restore harmony between the spiritual and material worlds. Their sexual energy is not deviant but vital, instrumental in maintaining the balance of communal life. Somé’s account, which evidences divinely ordered manifestations of gender nonconformity, becomes a starting point for Mandeng Nken’s excavation into “unorthodox” performances of gender that predate colonial timelines

FLOODGATE emerges as an informal catalogue of transgressive moments or ritual acts hidden in plain sight that challenge dominant understandings of gender, time, and belonging. Through layered soundscapes, ancestral references, prose poetry and moving images, the installation invites viewers to meditate on gatekeeping not as exclusion, but as a sacred labor: a call to hold space between worlds. The title, more spiritual than biblical, signals the threshold the gatekeeper must protect: between history and technology, body and archive, spirit and flesh, past and becoming.