Voncena’s Spell

HYBRID PERFORMANCE, ARCHIVE, AND INSTALLATION

(forthcoming, 2025)

Voncena’s Spell is a live artwork exploring the intersection of memory, memorial, and the speculative futures of radical Black death. Part auto-fiction, part space maroon odyssey, the work uses queer archival strategies to journey into the complex layers of Black existence, ecological grief, and blood memory. Set aboard the spacecraft Voncena in a near-distant future, an AI—named after and embodying jaamil olawale kosoko’s deceased mother—reawakens with sentience in a foreign galaxy. Experiencing the ontological delay of a new anti-verse surrounding them, this genre-bending performance combines live feed media, choreography, and black-out poetics, to immerse the audience in a complex physical narrative where personal and collective histories merge. Voncena's Spell represents the awakening of silenced histories portaling within a vessel toward a Black future beyond capture.