Marcelline Mandeng Nken

Marcelline Mandeng Nken (b. in Yaoundé, Cameroon) combines video, sculpture, sound, and biomatter into installations that double as modular open stages for performative inquiry and non linear/parallel storytelling. In my practice, I reconstruct the voices of diasporic women authors, pop stars, and critical thinkers residing on the margins of society into scripts. I then reimagine their lived experiences, in parallel with my own, into cinematic, mythic, and surrealist fictions that challenge and reify the limitations of representation and collective memory. Drawing from my matrilineal lineage of caretakers, including medical service practitioners and holistic herbalists, I am invested in economies of care as systems of value within the home, taught and inherited genetically as a birthright or an embodied memory carried from within the womb.