Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome multidisciplinary artist Gaëlle Étémé, born in Cameroon and residing in Canada, with three selections: aaah, that day, and the road, from her conceptual visual art series Maybe just maybe we can meet the Marvelous again.
These works begin with an unexpectedly humble gesture: a small pane of glass, no more than five to ten centimeters across, brushed with red pastel and photographed with a cell phone. From this intimate surface Étémé generates hundreds of images, each one digitally treated and grayscaled to reveal dramatic textures formerly masked by color. What emerges feels archaeological: fragments of a fresco unearthed inside a tomb, a mausoleum exposed by machine, the residue of a vanished civilization. In the VR installation she is developing, viewers will wander this tomb, encountering each image as an inscription left by vanished beings.
The complexity of Étémé’s work is striking, and her world‑building wholly captivating. She did not initially see herself as an artist; she trained as a researcher. Yet in the process she found herself drawn into a new and experimental field: research‑creation, an arts‑based practice that merges creativity, experimentation, and reflection with academic inquiry. It is a discipline that asks for porous boundaries and intellectual courage—qualities Étémé possesses in abundance, even if academia fails to appreciate the nuances of her work.
Her work operates much like translation, seeking first to listen, then to express objects as abstract consciousnesses in terms humans can perceive. Each image becomes a threshold, a point of contact between material reality and the interior life of things. You can read more about her process and her story in Singing with Objects: Surrender and Revelation in the Artwork of Gaëlle Étémé. Speaking with Étémé was exhilarating; her practice is a reminder that the marvelous is not lost, only waiting for us to learn how to connect to it.
View Étémé’s fascinating work and step into her awareness in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Gaëlle Étémé (she/her) is a self-taught visual and multidisciplinary artist of Cameroonian origin, now living in Sherbrooke, QC, Canada. She seeks neither to describe nor to compose. Her gesture is as much a musical composition as the means by which speculative worlds open up to her. “I” is impossible to define. Maybe just maybe we can meet the Marvelous again, MJMWCMTMA, is a speculative world-building world in which several abstract consciousnesses dream of an equation of reality as they seek to become human. To do this, they must travel to EQ-CITY, the city from which all the world’s equations are said to originate. But then, at the heart of their consciousness, they encounter a strange war, that of General and the Nameless. It is said that in EQ-CITY lies the origin of war. It is also said that we find the keys to the city when we have learned to sing.