For the past few years, Raphaël Barontini has increasingly been working with textile collages that completely fill the spaces they occupy. Monumental, vast, colorful, and virtually immutable, they dominate their surroundings yet remain light and fragile in their materiality. The Paris-based artist’s work focuses on historical figures, primarily from the Caribbean and Africa, who, as he says, have not yet been given the place they deserve in history as written by the West. For this reason, Barontini’s artistic research into each of these figures often remains fragmentary, much like their portraits. There is frequently little written or visual documentation. At the same time, he emphasizes that he is not in search of absolute truth. Instead, he says, his work is a mixture of fact, history, fiction, and fantasy. He terms this approach “critical fabulation.” “What interests me,” explains Raphaël Barontini, “is delving into the lives of certain individuals and then portraying and honoring them. In my works, I create a kind of memorial to them so that I can write a counter- history.” For Raphaël Barontini, writing this counter-history also means tracing his own roots, stories, and memories. However, this process can also lead to essentially imagined paintings that serve to explore the creolization of Caribbean culture, particularly in the interplay between African, European, and Indigenous mythologies. This also explains his use of textile collage, which he often supplements with performances inspired by carnival dances. The figures the artist researches or imagines are part of revolutionary history, yet have ended up as forgotten heroes and heroines— such as Marthe-Rose, also known as Toto, who occupies a central space in the Kunsthaus. Although little else is known about her, she is regarded as a symbolic figure in the struggle against the reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe in 1802. She is noted for being the partner of Louis Delgrès, a solider from Martinique who played a pivotal role as an officer in the revolutionary armies. Following the highly dramatic events surrounding the defense of Fort Saint-Charles (now Fort Delgrès) in Basse-Terre against the advancing French battalion, which Delgrès was heavily involved in and which ultimately led to subjugation and the reinstatement of slavery, Marthe-Rose Toto was also wounded, captured, and executed—but not without fighting for the resistance until the bitter end. Her commitment to the cause has made her a figurehead for the role played by women in the 1802 Guadeloupe rebellion as well as in resistance movements against slavery in general. Raphaël Barontini’s work resembles an inventory that serves to prevent real people from being forgotten. People who have been immortalized as heroes and heroines in stories or even myths— diverse, from different backgrounds and generations—and whom the artist helps to emerge from obscurity or historical omission into (a new) presence. For him, this is also an opportunity to connect the present with the past and our imagined visions of the future.

How can you tell the story of Nigeria—one so closely intertwined with your own—when the existing narratives have been so heavily influenced by colonial history, by missionaries, military violence, political machinations, and the erasure of Indigenous languages and their narratives, and when families themselves can often only pass down and remember the history of the last two or three generations? The artist Onome Ekeh was born in the United States and raised in Nigeria—in Yorubaland, with family roots in the Niger Delta. She now lives in Basel, where she works and teaches. She describes herself as an author and creator of speculative spaces. With an artistic repertoire spanning sound, video, imagery, graphic novels, text, AI, and generative code, she tells personal and collective stories of a culture that cannot dependably rely on its own narratives. The reason for this, as the artist explains in an interview, is that their erasure by the colonial powers occurred primarily through the suppression of Indigenous languages and customs, but also through the imposition of foreign value systems, such as Christianity, on the population. These narratives must therefore rely on oral traditions and the memories of friends, family, and communities, on gaps in knowledge or on things that were erased or perhaps never even mentioned in later texts or documents, covered up or supplanted by colonial narratives. For this reason, Onome Ekeh’s artistic practice involves retelling stories composed solely of fragments of the past: oral accounts, private photo archives, artifacts, myths, longings, and speculations. Stories that people have passed down and imagined across generations in Nigeria and in the diaspora, within an ever- changing political reality shaped by its colonial and military history. Using AI-generated images, codes, and symbols that flash briefly and then vanish again, the artist creates a visual language that reflects the complexity of African migration—driven by oppression and violence, as well as political and military displacement—while simultaneously creating spaces of freedom and beauty, spaces of possibility and the future. Onome Ekeh calls these “corrective spaces,” imbued with the poetry of rupture. At the Kunsthaus Baselland, a geometric surface made of piles of salt crystals reminiscent of pixels becomes a projection surface for portraits that slowly take form out of codes yet remain difficult to distinguish in their entirety. They are accompanied by a sound that swells and then subsides, at times gently caressing the visual image, at other times seeming to scratch at its surface and deconstruct what is seen. These are fragments of vanished worlds and people, but also potential visions of beauty, elegance, and freedom, of being able to dream of a future despite everything.

Finding the right terms for these complex works is no easy task; Joana Escoval herself does not describe them as sculptures, but rather as oscillators, modulators, capacitors, or even resistors— invisible generators of heat, like those moving through the spaces. They are repositories of memories, of stories in space and time. It could also be useful to find terms for the artist’s work that unite tone, sound, and music, even though many of her often large-scale installations remain silent. Despite this, rhythm, permeation, sound flow, and transformation are terms that can be applied to her installations. At the Kunsthaus, too, the Lisbon- based artist invites visitors to wander through her works and explore the various, sometimes highly delicate pieces and their stories. They tell of places, time, and space. Within the structure, brass tubes float in the space, evoking fine wind instruments that could produce sounds when the air passes through their openings. The slender brass rods that Escoval guides through the space in a wave- like pattern are also reminiscent of energy or sound waves that travel from one work to the next, penetrating walls, ending in or emanating from sculptural ears, and weaving everything together. They make their way through the spaces like a great gust of air, moving as one. The daylight entering from the towers bounces off the gleaming metal surfaces. This potential and indeed actual interaction with nature—its stories and elements, its forces and forms of dialogue— has long shaped the artist’s work. Escoval herself regularly visits her studio in the countryside just outside Lisbon to work with natural materials, their stories and memories. One of the artist’s primary motivations is to engage with the narratives of nature: its cosmic connections, its interrelationships, and its coexistence, which we are part of as humans. Escoval’s sculptures can thus be understood not only as a material presence in space, but also as processes of dissolving matter that continue on in our imaginations. When the artist melts and shapes the metals, tracing delicate pathways through the space, allowing each material to follow the architecture and its character, as well as the people and their movements within it, she seems to visibly transform the space into something that embraces the viewer rather than keeping them at a distance. “Beings, subjects, and materials are not self-contained,” explains the artist, “but are constantly set in motion by circulation: porous, breathing bodies, cocooned by the same charged material substance in which they exist, odorless and invisible. The outside world enters the body through inhalation and leaves it through exhalation, a gust of wind that reunites with the world once again.” These are narratives of nature and its forces that Escoval explores— not in an esoteric sense, but through the ability to move around and experience them within a time- space continuum.

[Project in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - Delegation in France as part of the GULBENKIAN EXHIBITIONS programme to support Portuguese artistic scene in European cultural institutions”]

How can dreams of a prosperous future be realized in a country that has faced so many challenges throughout its history? Even though we continue to contend with poverty and a generation of young people searching for future prospects, an abundant land lies before us—rich in resources and full of potential. The secret, according to artist Binelde Hyrcan lies in believing that we can look back on the past together with wisdom and transform this wealth into real opportunities for society as a whole. Born in Luanda, the capital of Angola, Binelde Hyrcan grew up surrounded by the energy of a large family with ten siblings. Although he went to the south of France and Monaco to study art, he never lost touch with his homeland in Angola. On the contrary: he carries Angola within him as a deep and enduring bond. Through his multifaceted oeuvre—which combines large- scale installations, poetic videos, and delicate drawings—he weaves a rich, sensitive, historical narrative, free from narrow external perspectives, particularly those that have shaped our view of the colonial era for so many years. For Hyrcan, it is vital to engage honestly with Angola’s past and to tell the story of his identity from his own perspective, while at the same time daring to imagine a new future. This obligation is also evident in the concrete support he consistently provides to young artists through his projects—for, as he emphasizes, the culture of a people must be preserved so that a society never loses its memory and its essence. Deeply affected by the years of civil war in Luanda, which lasted into the early 2000s, Hyrcan is all too familiar with the contrasts of the city: the strength of its community, its resilience in the face of adversity, and its ability to find beauty in apparently simple things. In his art, he lightly and poetically juxtaposes experiences of loss, violence, and hardship with a spirit of togetherness and an appreciation for the seemingly small things. In this way, it becomes possible, despite everything, to dream of a better future—a future that emerges from within and is built by Angolan people themselves. In his video Cambeck , for example, four children build an imaginary car in the sand on the beach: they sit in holes dug into the ground, their eyes fixed on the sea, and embark on a journey in their imagination. Somewhere between playing and playfully dreaming, they talk about a life of prosperity, exuding a disarming light-heartedness. Even in the work WE ARE ALL IN , repurposed gasoline cans—often associated with poverty, carrying water, heaviness, and burden from a Western perspective—are transformed by the artist into a balloon-like object that seems to defy gravity while transcending boundaries and outdated ideas. This is one of the most beautiful aspects of Hyrcan’s work: rather than focusing solely on the traces of poverty or suffering, he highlights people’s potential, pride, and resilience. He shows that it is possible to imagine a better life for yourself without ever abandoning your own identity, history, and culture.

The viewer is soon captivated by the vast cartographic display of daily and weekly newspapers from around the world, as a model train relentlessly, almost defiantly, makes its way through this landscape in an endless loop. Journey to Nowhere is a journey through the peaks and troughs of everyday events. Equipped with a small camera, the train broadcasts live images that are projected into the exhibition space. The frequent disruptions during the transmission echo the deceptive idyll initially conveyed by the undulating landscape of the sprawling installation: breaking news, political conflicts, and human catastrophes become fleeting moments that are quickly left behind and out of sight. What does it take for them to affect us for longer than just when we are reading, flicking, or scrolling through the news—what does it take for them to remain in our memory and influence our active behavior? How can we distinguish right from wrong—or true from false—at such a fast pace? “Everyone,” says Maté, “sees reality from the perspective of their own obsessions, their own stories, and their own attitudes to world events, which each find their way into the private sphere.” Mateo Maté always approaches his works with great sensitivity, works in which the private meets the public, the political meets the existential, and the individual meets the collective. Everyday and familiar elements, which are inherent in many of his works and may initially seem playful or even amusing, are stripped back by the artist, layer by layer, to reveal their secret—and above all existential—core. What kind of mental landscape, what kind of landscape of action do we find ourselves in day after day? Maté’s Timeless Landscapes works also tread this ambivalent line: these images of landscapes rightly recall the Impressionist deconstruction of the landscape into patches of different colors and tones. Yet what seems familiar to us today, particularly in a museum context, changes fundamentally upon closer inspection: the works are made up of real fragments of military uniforms and their camouflage, color-coordinated to match various territories and war zones around the world. These pockets, sleeves, and collars not only reflect the iconography of military clothing and the historically documented military appropriation of the Impressionists’ artistic achievements in the nineteenth century—the depiction of the texture, terrain, vegetation, and climatic phenomena of a region. Above all else, they evoke the perfectly camouflaged bodies intended to disappear completely into the landscape of a war zone. For Maté, this also represents an additional step: a kind of demilitarization of the clothing, returning its camouflage to its original form—deconstructing it into a raw material, like oil paint from a tube, and using it to capture the different facets of enchanting landscapes. At the same time, however, his artistic practice becomes an exploration of the journey undertaken by the iconography of nineteenth- century painting over time: by cloaking the bodies of colonial soldiers, it conquered the world; now, drenched in violence, it has returned to painting.

Aline Motta didn’t begin working as an artist until relatively late in life; in fact, she only started around a decade ago after spending fifteen years working in script and continuity roles on film sets in Brazil. In 2016, she received a grant that allowed her to work and travel. As a result, her body of work, which is only a few years old and combines film, video, photography, installation, performance, and poetry, feels somewhat like an eruption. Her work explores the traces of Brazil’s colonial past and links personal family histories with collective narratives of migration, enslavement, and erasure. The oral family history passed down by her grandmother serves as the starting point for her artistic exploration of individual and collective identity and history. In the video shown here, Filha Natural / Natural Daughter , Motta delves into the complex history of her great- grandmother Francisca—based solely on oral accounts—and traces her maternal lineage, where Afro-Atlantic connections intersect and overlap. By contemplating concepts such as the slave trade, the diaspora, belonging, and identification, while simultaneously traveling to the locations connected to her family and community, Motta reconfigures these relationships in her own way and positions herself as the author of her own history. Through this research, things that were (for a long time) neither able to be told nor believed are imbued with reality and truth. Based on family photographs— mostly those used for official documents such as passport photos—archival materials, oral accounts—including those passed down over generations in the diaspora—and nature photographs, Aline Motta weaves her filmed stories into an intertwined, multi- part artistic epic. The fragmentary nature of her narratives is, as she describes it, both her method and a creative invitation to project your own stories onto them. One particularly striking aspect of this is her concept of time: for her, the past is not a closed chapter, but something that continually influences the present. Her works thus encourage us to view history not merely as a sequence of facts, but as an emotional and subjective framework that can influence our identity. Motta repeatedly features water from various rivers—whether in Brazil, Portugal, Sierra Leone, or Nigeria—as a kind of leitmotif in her videos. These rivers become vessels of memory, for instance when the artist prints photographs of her grandmother and parents onto delicate fabrics and sets them afloat on small rafts. For her, the artist explains, water is breath, vibration, and the element that connects everything, just like grandmothers, who in her culture symbolize healing and conflict resolution. At the same time, water is also associated with displacement, flight, and human trafficking; it is conceived, Aline Motta continues, as a kind of time machine endowed with memory. This is something that would also interest her about Switzerland, with all its great lakes and rivers—how many stories are still waiting to be discovered and told here. Through this sensitive yet critical approach, Aline Motta’s political and poetic art encourages us to reflect on origin, belonging, and the construction of memory. In doing so, she opens up new perspectives on the relationship between things that are real, heard, and imagined, between the individual and history—not only for herself, but for everyone who encounters her work.

Helena Uambembe gives presence to narratives that are at risk of disap pearing. The Angolan-South African artist, who lives and works in Berlin, develops works that often appear playful and light at first glance, while simultaneously confronting violen ce, colonial oppression, and their ongoing intergenerational conse quences. These stories raise the question of how they can be told at all when trauma is embedded across gene rations and often resists articulati on, and when colonial histories have largely been written from Western perspectives that fail to reflect the lived realities of people in Angola and beyond. Uambembe grew up in Pomfret with her family, who had fled the Ango lan civil war in the 1970s. Her bio graphy is entangled with a complex and still insufficiently acknowledged post-colonial history in which Eu rope played a direct and decisive role. During their displacement, Angolan men—like Helena’s fat her— were confronted with a stark choice: return to a war-torn country or join the South African apartheid military. Many, for whom return was not viable, entered the 32nd Battalion under conditions shaped by coercion and survival. With the end of the Cold War and Namibia’s approaching independence, these soldiers and their families were relo cated in 1989 to Pomfret, a remote township in the Kalahari Desert in northwestern South Africa. There, they were deployed both in the apartheid regime’s military opera tions and in the hazardous asbestos mining industry. Although the South African govern ment later attempted to dismantle Pomfret and withdraw essential in frastructure in 2004, the community remained. For many, it was the only home they had ever known—despi te, or perhaps because of, its violent foundations. As Uambembe states in conversati on, it is crucial to remember who we are and where we come from, and to insist on collective and personal histories that risk being erased or rewritten. In her spatial installation How to Make a Mud Cake, now shown internationally, Uambembe engages with postcolonial histories and their modes of narration. What at first appears playful—a cake made of mud and earth, reminiscent of chil dren’s games and decorated with flowers—gradually reveals itself as a subtle yet sharp intervention. It challenges the viewer to reconsider inherited Eurocentric perspectives and to confront what has long been obscured or normalized.

How do we consume Latin America—through architecture, food, or agricultural products like bananas? What can we learn from the stories, gestures, and materials that we adopt and perpetuate about other countries? Sofía Salazar Rosales, whose parents are from Ecuador and Cuba—and who herself left Ecuador at the age of eighteen to move to France— positions these questions at the center of her emerging body of work, which could not be more multifaceted or profound. It is shaped by collective and personal memories and experiences in Latin America, but also by encounters and events in places where she studied or spent extended periods, such as Amsterdam, Lyon, and Paris. At the Kunsthaus, the now Paris- based artist guides visitors through a series of structures, gestures, and sculptures that evoke precious or durable materials, though they themselves are nothing of the sort. As they move through these spaces and structures, visitors can sense their great poetry as well as the appreciation that the artist extends not only to these simple materials, but particularly to the history of their origins, which is often marked by migration, displacement, the colonial past, loss, and longing. Made from found cardboard, some of these delicate, fragile structures are several meters tall; they are reminiscent of gates or painted metal grilles, which are ubiquitous in many cities—including Cuba, which the artist recently visited. These gates separate the private from the public, representing protection for some and exclusion and boundaries for others. “These gates were a perfect example of my work,” explains the artist in an interview. “Even fear needs to be beautiful.” Salazar Rosales is interested in the parallels between the agricultural export of basic raw materials and the way cities and their development evolve in response to the economic success of certain products. While at school in Ecuador, she learned about World War I and World War II, but everything was taught in the context of agricultural exports. “We learned history through the products we depend on and the stories that are told.” The artist’s longing for the elusive is captured perfectly here: something that emanates from the stillness of the objects, evolves as we move around them, and through our interrogation can become more beautiful, reveal its origins, and offer greater insight. After all, reproducing stories and objects in different materials also means retelling these stories in new and different ways: inclusion rather than exclusion, fragility rather than immutability, the reformulation of existing modes of thinking and connotations, and above all new freedoms and liberties. Sofía Salazar Rosales further emphasizes that art is about creating connections and interweaving the past and present in order to produce something new and meaningful.