Soñ Gweha. Kôô: Libations for Grief

For the Klima Biennale 26’, ENTRE presents “Kôô: Libations for Grief (Samples, Spirals, and Sonic Offerings),” a site-specific exhibition of sculptural, sonic, and video works by Soñ Gweha. The exhibition draws from the conceptual and material cosmology of the artist’s ongoing project, “KÔÔ / ACHATINA / IGBIN: the snail’s queer erotics and the spiral of time.”

Gweha’s work centers around the Achatina snail, known as Kôô among the Bassa people of Cameroon, which is classified by the Global Invasive Species Database as one of the world’s most destructive invaders. While often framed as a biological threat, the global circulation of the snail is inseparable from human activity: colonial trade routes, extractive agriculture, contemporary regimes of pest control. Across the regions where it proliferates, humans are its most sustained predators, harvesting, farming, and eradicating it at scale. The snail’s status as “invasive” thus mirrors the asymmetries of responsibility that underlie the climate crisis itself.

Reframed as a healing spiritual entity, the snail becomes here a symbol of communal care and a sonic device: its shell used as a rattle accompanying revolutionary hymns, its apex as a makeshift turntable needle. Listening with and through this non-human species, Gweha proposes an acoustics of dissidence attuned to ancestral revolutionary practices.

In the Mbock traditions of the Bassa people, the Kôô is a cosmological mediator associated with patience, continuity, and spiral temporality, for instance in the Ifa traditions among the Yoruba of Nigeria and in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, where the land snail (Igbin) is also linked to ritual offering and ethical relation. Situated within these knowledge systems, the exhibition frames grief—personal, communal, and planetary—as an invasive yet generative force, proposing a space for listening, healing, and ecological attunement.