Digital Ghosts and Shape-Shifting: Sandra Mujinga’s Flo

My name is Sandra Mujinga. I am a Norwegian artist born in Goma, DR Congo. This is my piece Flo, from 2019, and it’s titled after my late mom, whom I lost when I was 15.

When I made this work, I was thinking about digital ghosts, and ways of working with opacity and ways of working with contradictions of being hyper-visible and invisible at the same time, which I think is a reality for many Black bodies. Using the dark space as agency, seeing the possibilities in existing in the dark rather than being visible, has also affected my work.

I made Flo in a time when I was seeing several holograms of celebrities that were still touring—Tupac, Whitney Houston—and I was thinking of it as this clear gesture of having people with us or insisting that somehow technology could surpass death. I was also thinking about it in the context of living in a time when I have multiple friends who have passed that still have their social media presence, and how we interact with that.

What you see when you enter the space is mainly darkness. At some point, you realize that your eyes will also adjust to the darkness. The piece is about letting go and being in the space, and merging with the piece through the sound and being able to sit and absorb it all.

You’ll see a silhouette of something that could look human, but it’s more abstract. You see a body that is modeled after Ann-Marie Crooks, a bodybuilder who I was fascinated by, because I spent a period researching Black women bodybuilders. I was drawn to this idea of them expanding their bodies, rather than making themselves smaller. So then I was collecting images of Black women bodybuilders, and at some point I started making what would somehow be a homage to them, and then that resulted in wearable sculptures.

The wearable sculpture that the performer, Adrian Blount, is wearing is a full, faux-leather, wearable sculpture. It’s quite heavy. It somewhat lives its own life. Brown leather was interesting to me because I was looking for something that could be as close to skin color as possible. In Norway, there’s still a word that is used when we say skin color, it’s usually referring to whiteness. And I’ve been thinking of ways to find my own skin color. That’s why I’m so drawn to working with different browns, particularly with this wearable sculpture too. I call it that instead of it being a garment because it’s a way to think about the fabric having its own agency, and there’s also a way to think about the body being in dialogue with something rather than how a garment would adapt to the body. I gave Adrian the assignment to basically move as a bodybuilder would, and with that came limitations that shaped the choreography and movement of Adrian.

The ghost is floating in space, and this is through a technique called Pepper’s ghost, which is like a hologram, and something I found out about when I was researching different hologram concerts. It’s basically having a surface reflecting what is projected onto the ground, placed at a 45-degree angle. It’s a technique that has been used since the 1800s for theater, and to actually create the illusions of ghosts. What you see is also like a repetition; the element is flickering. One doesn’t really know when the body’s appearing and when the body will disappear again. Through the layering of the digital files, it makes the body ephemeral, and in that sense, even though it is based on a bodybuilder, it is almost protecting the body through it not being fully opaque. I was thinking about how the Black body has been seen as threatening, and how this can cause real danger to it. The body is using this tool to also disappear in the dark.