Project 41
En busca del Jengu - Bana Bha Meheba
January 17th - February 14th, opening on Friday January 17th from 7pm
Bana Bha Meheba are Agnes Essonti Luque, Bernardita Ekobo Rondo and Cándida Nlang Ndong Mbasogo.
"We are water. 83% of our brain, 75% of our heart, 85% of our lungs and 95% of our eyes are water. If we are drained, there is very little left. Seen in this way, we could say that our gaze, thought, breathing and heartbeat depend on water".
Yayo Herrero, Los cinco elementos: An ecological literacy primer (2021)
En busca del Jengu (In search of jengu) is a project by Bana Bha Meheba (Daughters of Water, in the Ndowé language), a collective in movement that exists in different places, with roots in Central Africa, the land of our Ancestors. Agnes has one foot in Cameroon and the other in southern Spain, at least symbolically. Bernardita and Cándida live in Bata, capital of the mainland region of Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. Our project focuses on collecting and archiving memories of healing and transformation linked to water.
Understanding water as a primordial element and territory, and at the same time traversed by questions of preservation of our cultures, as well as by ecofeminist theory, we have joined in this research to find the Jengu, a mythological character in the Sawa Ndowé cosmologies that reminds us of a mermaid. In the process we have held firmly to the idea that not all unknowns must be solved, posing a journey of one and many lives, where the meeting point and connection is the waters in which we swim.
We are grateful to the ECO24 team for all the listening and support they have offered us during these months. We are also grateful to the Centro Cultural de España en Bata for financially supporting the project, to our families and friends for believing in us and to Tangent Projects for giving us the space to bring stories that may seem far away.