Returning Home: Beya Gille Gacha on Curating NZƏNDA for the Cameroon Pavilion.

For the Republic of Cameroon’s presentation at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, artist and curator Beya Gille Gacha reflects on creating NZƏNDA. This immersive Pavilion draws on Indigenous knowledge, sound, ritual and contemporary art to propose a different way of experiencing healing, memory and the living world.

29 July 2026

At the heart of the Republic of Cameroon’s National Pavilion is NZƏNDA, a Medumba word meaning “the door” or “the way home.” Conceived by artist and curator Beya Gille Gacha as an immersive environment rather than a conventional exhibition, the Pavilion invites visitors to move through a sensory landscape shaped by sound, architecture, medicinal plants, performance and contemporary artistic practice. Bringing together six artists whose work is grounded in Cameroon’s diverse cultural and ecological traditions, NZƏNDA explores the interconnectedness of ancestry, memory, spirituality and the natural world. In conversation with ART AFRICA, Gacha discusses the curatorial thinking behind the Pavilion, the role of Indigenous knowledge in contemporary practice, and how Cameroon’s contribution responds to the theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys.

Suzette Bell-Roberts: Rather than presenting a conventional exhibition, NZƏNDA unfolds as an immersive journey. How did the curatorial concept evolve, and what does the title mean within the context of the Pavilion?

Beya Gille Gacha: Indeed, NZƏNDA was never conceived as an exhibition. It was always conceived as a passage, a path. In Medumba, Nzənda means “the door,” “the way home.” I chose this word not only for its literal meaning, but for the poetic and spiritual resonance I perceive in it. The door becomes an invitation into a journey of transformation—the path one takes to return, to recover one’s memory, one’s responsibility towards the living, and ultimately towards oneself. From the very beginning, I did not want to build an exhibition of artworks. I wanted to create an experience. A space where visitors would not simply come to look at objects, but to cross thresholds. When we learned that this edition of the Biennale would be the last imagined by Koyo Kouoh, everything took on another dimension. The Pavilion also became an offering. A way of honouring her memory, while continuing her invitation to shift our gaze—to see through other eyes. Rather than representing Cameroon through fixed symbols or a singular national identity, we wanted to reveal a living space where memory, spirituality, contemporary creation and ecology cannot be separated. In fact, if you remain in the Pavilion long enough, you begin to realise that you are sharing it with lizards, grasshoppers and birds that have quietly made it their home. In NZƏNDA, you do not simply move from one artwork to another. You enter a temple, where you are invited to cross doors, guided and accompanied by the works themselves. It is a total work. I could not separate my practice as an artist from this curatorial gesture. For me, curating NZƏNDA meant creating a work on the scale of a pavilion, where we—the artists, our works, the plants, the sound, the architecture, and the visitors themselves—would all become the living material of the work.

The Pavilion brings together sound, performance, architecture, medicinal knowledge, and contemporary art. Why did you choose this approach?

I deeply believe that the separation between disciplines is a profoundly Western construction. In many African and Indigenous cultures, art has never been separated from medicine, music, architecture, care, speech or ritual. Everything vibrates together. I wanted the Pavilion to function according to that same logic. The place is not merely architecture—it is the chalice in which everything is created, the mother’s womb. By a beautiful coincidence, our palazzo was once a chapel dedicated to a woman Saint. Light becomes a material. Sound is not a soundtrack; it is made of active frequencies. The plants do not decorate the space; they speak to those visitors who know how to listen. And performance, in itself, does not exist. It is a ritual. It is an act of consecration, of connection, of invocation, of opening between dimensions—which is precisely what gives such power to Zora Snake’s practice. Bienvenue Fotso’s thresholds devoted to medicinal plants, Neals Niat’s cartographic textiles and ceremonial ceramics, my own guiding sculptures inhabited by entities, Jail Time Records’ journey of transmutation—from the inner prison to the waters of the ancestors… all of these speak the same language. Because the true intention was to create a magical space, we had to respond to certain alchemical laws. Those laws reside in the harmony between forms and modes of expression, and in the balance of those who carry them, making the Pavilion a living, breathing work of art.

Why were ancestry, memory, ecology and spirituality at the heart of Cameroon’s national presentation?

Because, to me, they are not separate themes. They are intertwined realities. Ancestry is not about looking nostalgically towards the past. It is about recognising that we are never isolated individuals—we never walk alone. We inherit gestures, wounds, languages, knowledge, silences and dreams. Our bodies carry that memory. We carry our ancestors within us. And we carry the earth within us. From that moment on, ecology becomes self-evident. If we belong to the same living fabric as trees, rivers, stones and animals, then destroying nature also means destroying a part of ourselves. To love one’s own body is to love every body. To honour one’s own body is to honour every body. To remember this—not as an intellectual idea, but through the felt experience of the flesh—is to realign oneself, and in doing so, to realign everything. The spirituality I speak of should not be understood in a religious sense. I am speaking of a way of inhabiting the world that recognises the constant dialogue between the visible and the invisible. Cameroon possesses an extraordinary cultural and ecological diversity, a complex history, but above all a frequency that opens you to recognising that there is a world inaccessible to the rational mind—a world where all these realities naturally interconnect. This wholeness, this One, lies at the heart of Cameroon’s proposal because it makes sense from within Cameroon itself, but also because I felt it spoke profoundly to the condition of the world today. This choice first emerged because it has always been central to my own artistic practice. Then… last year, we were all confronted with revelations that exposed the extent to which Western societies are governed by illness. In that context, this proposal took on an even deeper meaning for me: it is time to heal, and perhaps the key lies precisely in African and indigenous notions that have been dismissed and devalued for far too long.

The exhibition draws on Indigenous knowledge systems while addressing contemporary concerns. How did you negotiate the relationship between tradition and contemporary artistic practice?

Tradition is often imagined as the repetition of the past. I believe exactly the opposite. A living tradition continues to generate something new. The artists of NZƏNDA do not reproduce ancient forms. We use contemporary technologies, yet everything always comes from somewhere, and inherited knowledge continuously gives birth to new forms. We work from ancient inheritances and lineages of thought. That is something very different. The intention was never to folklorise our Indigenous cultures, nor to imprison them in the past. I wanted to show that our cultures remain intellectual and sensitive resources, fully capable of engaging with the great questions of our time.

How did you select the artists?

Beyond the fact that each artist possesses a powerful and singular universe, I chose them because they share the same way of inhabiting the world. These are artists who take the time to research, who work through listening rather than spectacle. Formally, our practices are very different. Yet what binds us together is not a common aesthetic. It is an energetic coherence. To me, they are more than artists. They are alchemists. And that also leads me to say, very sincerely, that alchemists are those who are capable of creating magic under extremely difficult conditions, sometimes from almost nothing. That was precisely the context of the Cameroon Pavilion. It therefore demanded people who possessed the genius of the hand, but also the humility of the initiate, the devotion of the believer, the heart to perform an act of love, and the mental strength of the warrior: alchemists.

Cameroon is often described as ‘Africa in miniature’ because of its cultural and ecological diversity. How has this complexity informed your curatorial approach to the Pavilion?

Cameroon is indeed a country of extraordinary cultural, linguistic and ecological richness. But I did not want to create a catalogue of that diversity. I wanted to show how different realities can coexist without being reduced to a single narrative. The Pavilion functions like a living organism. Many voices inhabit it at once. Many cosmologies. Many rhythms. That complexity is not a problem to be solved. It is precisely what gives Cameroon its strength. A country that vibrates without placing one people above another. A country where one learns to dance with the altar, rather than define it—and, by defining it, erase it.

NZƏNDA invites visitors to experience the Pavilion through the body as much as through observation. Why is this important?

Because the body is our first archive, our first channel, and our first vehicle. Long before words, long before stories, the body remembers. The body knows. The body speaks. The entire scenography was conceived around this idea. Visitors move through spaces of light and darkness, through sound frequencies, the scent of earth and medicinal plants, materials that invite touch, and moments of silence. The woven mats scattered throughout the Pavilion are for use. Visitors are invited to sit, to meditate, to enter into communion. I did not want the Pavilion to be understood solely through the intellect. I wanted something to be felt before it could be explained. Some people leave carrying answers. Others leave carrying questions. Others still leave untouched. To me, each of these departures is equally precious.

The Biennale is framed by the theme In Minor Keys. How does NZƏNDA engage with this curatorial proposition while carrying a distinctly Cameroonian voice?

Koyo Kouoh was inviting us to change the way we listen. To pay attention to what is discreet, fragile, and so often overlooked. NZƏNDA responds to that invitation by refusing spectacular narratives. The Pavilion favours resonance over demonstration. It offers a space without pretension, vulnerable yet authentic—it is a woman’s womb. It is a temple that makes room for forms of knowledge and expression that vibrate within the invisible, within intuition, within those whispers we begin to hear again once we are no longer subjected to noise. Ultimately, it welcomes what is rarely recognised as legitimate technology or legitimate knowledge. In one of my artistic/curatorial texts, I wrote that my minor key is the deep frequency of the earth’s heartbeat. The haunting melody of a dreaming child. A call, from the depths of the womb, from the depths of time… If we invoke the mystical, the sensitive, our alignment with the earth and with the invisible, then the very notion of something being properly of one origin or another no longer truly holds.
Division and classification are human inventions. This temple evokes a return to essence. And essence lies far beyond the invention of any homeland. The Pavilion does not speak about Cameroon. It speaks from Cameroon. From a land that, like many others, still carries within its mountains, its villages, its secret societies, and its blood the keys to another relationship with the living, with magic, with care, and with the future. And as I read these words again, I realise that this way of seeing the world feels profoundly Cameroonian—without my being able to say that it belongs exclusively to Cameroon. If there is something that is truly and distinctly Cameroonian, I would say it lies not so much in the message itself as in the process—in the path. A path that may, in fact, matter even more than its destination. This Pavilion was born through forces, and one of those forces is hemlè. If the message carried by NZƏNDA is simply a human one, then the way it came into being is deeply and unmistakably Cameroonian.

This exhibition is on view at the Gervasuti Foundation, Calle Lunga Santa Caterina, Cannaregio 4998, Venice until 22 November 2026.