Inés-Sybille Vooduness, a resident artist at this year’s TNT, takes us on a quest for diasporic identity by adopting one of the intrinsic survival strategies of voodoo: syncretism, a mixture of elements from different belief systems and rituals. Voodoo was one of the main ways that slaves abducted by the colonial powers managed to stick together after their communal and cultural ties had been shattered. The strength that voodoo was able to instil in this diasporic population was as spiritual as it was political, as demonstrated by the revolution that led Haitian independence in 1791 and which began with none other than a voodoo ceremony.

Inés-Sybille, a descendant from that diaspora, faces the impossibility of assuming an identity. She is not directly recognised as Catalan, Haitian or anything else, and has embarked on the same stellar journey as Afrofuturists. Not to find herself in outer space, but in the groundwater that connects Haiti, Nigeria and Angola. From the ancestral serpent that surrounds the world to the Simbi, the guardian deities of springs and water, voodoo is full of aquatic references and allusions to the body’s ability to travel, and even to transcend the boundaries of time and space.

Angola’s own Kuduro dance is the strategy that Inés-Sybille employs to physically transport herself to Luanda. After performing this dance form for years, she wonders whether she can use it to access a state of transit in which she can engage in conversation with the Simbi. Just like Rokatei, in which Park Keito tries to contact an ancestral voice, and Soy un baile, where Rosa Romero opts for repetition as a strategy to change bodies, Inés-Sybille has created a solo ritual where her own history blends with the transtemporal waters of a whole series of underground narratives and unresolved conflicts, partly foreign and partly intimate inhabitants of our bodies.