Sandra Mujinga, Skin to Skin at Stedelijk Museum, an Interview by Matteo Giovanelli
On September 11th, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL) opened Skin to Skin, the new solo show by Sandra Mujinga, a portal to a unique parallel world. Conceived as a void, the exhibition room presents itself as a green space, translating the concept of the digital green screen into physical reality. Therefore, entering this space means being transported to another dimension, in which everything is possible and changeable. Inside the green, it feels like being part of the character selection screen of a videogame. Around us are fifty-five identical figures, huge avatars or clones, covered in layers of textile like phantoms without faces. These intimidating sculptures stand still, like they have always been there and will remain there forever, waiting. Alternating their rhythm are cubic or rectangular mirrors. These mirrors open other dimensions, in which we can find ourselves and the phantoms as our doppelgängers. In the background, music gradually appears, rises and then disappears continuously, like a solar cycle.
After all, we look the same, interconnected characters surfing the alternative wave of time.
– Matteo Giovanelli
Matteo Giovanelli: Walking into the Stedelijk’s exhibition room filled with green light, surrounded by statues and mirrors, we are immediately immersed in a space between reality and imagination. Can you talk about the connection between the green screen and this green space? How does this relationship open possibilities in your work and allow you to stretch or transform these spectral presences within the exhibition space?
Sandra Mujinga: I feel the green screen is basically a void. Whenever I see a green screen, I always think of complete darkness. Because it’s an empty, interchangeable space. I always think of the green screen as something that could be shifted into anything, so it becomes empty in the sense of potential. I think that’s the possibility the green screen gives to me. When I look at it, it could have been a forest in the background instead of the green color, for instance, or it could have been New York or something else. It’s similar to how we use it digitally, which also grants the possibility of imagining a never-ending world. It becomes a portal.
MG: Can one say that this is a way to translate the digital or imagined into the physical world?
SM: Yes, I would say that.
MG: Earlier you mentioned you were thinking about sunlight in this installation – can you explain more about that?
SM: I was talking with my friend and thinker Nijah Cunningham who has written about heliology (1) to think through decolonization and he asked, “Is the green light the sun?”, I thought that was an interesting world-building-element. I wanted it to function as a parallel: when you look at that lightened side, you can feel the sun is rising, the moon appears brighter on one side while the background is darker. Through that it became like parallel timelines – there’s this element of sunrise and sunset. Even the sun cycle in itself is about five minutes, and that could become an interesting way to imagine: what if, in this world, days could last five minutes?
MG: So once again you are reflecting on time, as you did in your previous exhibition Time as a Shield (2024). Is there a connection here between time and strategies for survival — ways of remaining alive?
SM: I think, in this case, bodies become time capsules. If you imagine a body being multiplied fifty-five times, you start to wonder which is the first body and which is the last. We tend to assert values by things, like aging or how long someone has been here. However, precisely because through them we don’t
know what was the first or last figure, the bodies themselves become containers of time.
MG: That’s interesting, so is there a relationship between the repetition of bodies, or time capsules, and music? And, is this related to your alter ego, NaEE RoBErts?
SM: Oh, that’s interesting! NaEE RoBErts has been my attempt to understand pop music as a kind of vernacular. It was really interesting in the practice of concerts, of sets, of repeating things again and again. So there is something about repetition…
MG: Still, is there a reflection of your music in the physical space? I was wondering if music also influenced the way you shaped the space – for example the repetition of lights, figures and mirrors seems similar to the rhythm you have in music.
SM: I would say that whenever I create a soundtrack, I often think of sound not only as music or composition, but as a time traveling tool, a way to anchor. For instance, in this space, when the sound comes in and you immediately sense, “oh, there is time” because of the soft sun-cycle in the room. But suddenly, with the activation of sound, you feel the passage of time differently. In my visual language there’s also an element of loop. I’ve made video works where someone is doing the same thing again and again, but the soundtrack adds other layers, because sound can create a sense of narrative, and it can give more information. In a way I would say that I trust more what I listen than what I see. I’m always drawn to that. Even in this work, the repetition and loop of figures create a sense that they’ve been here before. This also relates to ontology – Derrida hauntology (2) and the idea of traces from history – As human beings, we often feel we have been here before, repeating the same things again and again. And I think that element of the group, of repetition, is really interesting.
MG: Yes, that’s true, especially in this age when you can multiply yourself, create avatars, change your body and even be invisible despite the visibility that you can have.
You begin to doubt yourself and others, and the main issue becomes the relationship between visibility and invisibility. Can you tell me more about survival tactics against the hyper-surveillance we are facing now?
SM: Yes. One strategy is hyper visibility. But then, when you think of the portals here, it becomes contradictory. Mirrors are supposed to reveal more of ourselves, to give more information, but I mostly use mirrors as a way to block the body so you don’t see what’s behind. They become barriers. And then as you move around, you see multiplicity – bodies appearing again and again. This becomes a way to get lost in a community, to not be hyper-visible, and to form a new body. I think about that a lot in relation to concerts or demonstrations. The power of many, the power in numbers…
MG: In this regard, you once mentioned Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (3) and the concept of the Right to Opacity in connection with your work. Could you explain how it informs your approach?
SM: Yes, Glissant really helped me. In some of my earlier works I was already thinking about light seeping through. The Right to Opacity makes me ask: what does it mean to be visible in the first place? And what about the violence of visibility? Because that violence comes from structures that excluded you to begin with. If they excluded you, and then suddenly they say “now you are visible,” what does that visibility mean? Have those structures changed at all? I’m always drawn to these contradictions: you are visible, but at the same time invisible. You can be visible through surveillance, but invisible in terms of human rights. That paradox is central for me.
MG: Once you said: “I cheer for the monsters”. So I was wondering: what is your idea of engaging visitors entering the space and facing these monstrous phantoms?
Through the mirrors, for instance, it seems one could see oneself as part of them — as one among many, multiplied. Can you expand on this relationship?
SM: We tend to separate ourselves, yet we are always searching for fragments of who we are. That’s why I find abstraction compelling. When I think of monsters, it’s about rethinking colonial tropes — bodies once deemed dangerous or terrifying — and deconstructing them. Like in Disney’s movies, where villains were always darker, following the mad logic of darker versus lightness. And it has always been something we have been fed and normalized: as we grow older, we start asking if they were truly villains, or actually victims.
MG: Sometimes we feel more comfortable with villains, right?
SM: Yeah, exactly. They can feel more human in a way, and we recognize ourselves in them.
That’s also why I think concealment is interesting to work with. Even when you look at these figures, they might seem just like jackets, but they could also be skins. They’re covering something, but they are also protecting themselves? Even though these tall figures are among us, they remain ambiguous.
MG: So is this the meaning of the selected title Skin to Skin?
SM: Yeah, Skin to Skin is both about intimacy – the idea that we are related to how we jump from one skin to the next – and about the brutality of cloning and repetition. I came across this beautiful sentence in the book Thinking Through Skin edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (4), that skin is a soft clock. I am drawn to all the data the skin can host and histories, and scars and that book is good at tracing that. Also how the skin continues to be weaponised to form the other. In this case the cloned figure is multiplied fifty-five times, but instead of competing with each other, they become a community, one body together — so much that you can’t tell which one is which.
MG: Yeah, so to survive you have to stay in between visibility and invisibility…
SM: Yes. For me it’s more about kinship – the relationships that we have with each other and what that can mean in multiple ways. I think a lot about how we are together and how we take in information. For example, today we rely on Google Maps instead of asking a stranger for directions, or on ChatGPT instead of going to a librarian. I think about how stories used to be passed on — grandparents telling us about ancestors who had been here before and might appear again. It’s about how we are always connected across different times. And I also think about communicating with my future self, not only my past self. These timelines and doppelgänger are linked to this, and this is what I’m afraid of. Sometimes I’m even afraid of mirrors. When I brush my teeth and I wink, I’m afraid that the reflected person might not wink back. Suddenly the mirror feels like a window… and what if a mirror isn’t a mirror? What if there is a parallel space?
MG: Wow, now I feel paranoid… (laughs)
SM: Yeah, but then I realized also how, when I look in the mirror, sometimes I see my mother, or my friends. It’s storing traces and bearing witness around me. And sometimes, all of a sudden, they reappear through me – and I can smile or talk in a certain way. I find that beautiful: these traces reveal themselves in unexpected moments.
MG: So in the end, this dramatic music meant to embrace all these elements – about doppelgängers, multiple identities and repetition?
SM: Yeah, one could say it’s a way of holding space for all that. That’s what I find beautiful about music: the polyphonic composition, where different layers play, reaching their peak in synchronicity.
In this sense, sound reflects the repetition of bodies and the relationship they have: different textures and melodies, but still synchronized.
When you listen to the soundtrack, you realize it consists of three chapters. The first begins with strings that appear and fade in pads (second), and I think of that as their arrival, their presence in space. The last part of the composition feels like a volcanic eruption. However, the most intense passages are not necessarily an ending: I see them more as a loop, something that is revealing itself again and again.
MG: Is it a sort of continuing climax?
SM: Absolutely. I’ve always been fascinated by the climax that happens again and again. It relates to the ideas of the apocalypse as unveiling – the revelation of something already present. Through that there’s always the possibility of building again. Like we build worlds, again and again. It’s repetition, but also renewal.
–
1-Nijah Cunningham, Heliology: On the Metaphor of Decolonization in Representations, vol. 162, n. 1,
University of California Press, Berkeley 2023, pp. 44–55.
2-The term hauntology is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx: L’état de la
dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Éditions Galilée, Paris 1993), blending the terms
haunting and ontology, which refers to the persistence of elements from the past (like ghosts) that
continue to shape the present and the future.
3-Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1997.
4-Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey (Eds.), Thinking Through Skin, in Transformations series, Routledge,
London 2001.
Matteo Giovanelli
Matteo Giovanelli (Brescia, 1999) is an art historian, emergent curator, and writer with a versatile approach to contemporary art. Holding a BA in Cultural Heritage and an MA in Art History from the University of Verona, he has developed a versatile profile through his work at APALAZZOGALLERY, where he supported artists and contributed to the organization of exhibitions, international art fairs and curatorial projects, managing projects across all aspects of their realization. As a writer, Matteo collaborates with esteemed publications such as ARTFORUM and Flash Art, offering insightful critiques and analyses of contemporary artistic practices. he combines a keen eye for innovation with critical insight, offering thoughtful perspectives on the evolving art landscape.
You may also like
Monica Bonvicini at Capitain Petzel: It is Night Outside
There’s a moment, just as you cross the gallery’s threshold, when the darkness implied by the ti
15 – Reality Celebrity Clone Wars
Somewhere in the Forest, Montana, United States Whatever it was looked rabid, running violently and
Paolo Canevari: Memory, Power, and Transformation
Paolo Canevari, born in Rome in 1963, has established himself as a distinctive figure in the contemp
