NDEGE I – VII

Ndege, Swahili for “bird,” is a suspended flock of hybrid forms that occupies the liminal space of the portico—neither fully inside nor outside—reimagining it as a space of passage and transformation. Caught mid-air, the birds hover in a state of suspension—neither in flight nor at rest—suggesting the tension between captivity and release. Beneath them lie fragments of antiquity: Roman artifacts excavated from the soil, symbols of a fixed, monumental past. Mutu stages a contrast between the subterranean and the aerial, between the weight of history and the weightlessness of flight. Some birds appear bound by thread-like elements, as if entangled in their own potential escape. Ndege reframes the entrance as a symbolic threshold—a space of becoming, where time folds and histories remain unsettled. The work proposes a different temporality—one where memory hovers, the past remains porous, and the future has not yet landed.

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