The afternoon sun casts a clean, asymmetrical light over Elijah Ndoumbe’s beaming face as they welcome my video call into their Marseille apartment. Having concluded a research residency at RAW Academie and Doual'art in Douala, Cameroon centred around a multimedia eating experience with a particular familial recipe, they've spent the past few months grounding themself between here and Paris. The former is a fortress from which they rest and reconnect alongside the bewitching presence of the ocean. They tell me this was a necessary retreat from the astir nomadic life of an artist, chef and image maker. “I came back to Europe feeling down and a little lost so the reason why I made the decision to come to Marseille specifically, was to try and tap back into dreaming. I’m somebody who quests a lot in the notion of finding myself and my place in the world.” They are re-conceiving what their dreams look like and imagining the ways it can extend towards the shared dreams of their community. Movement in queer dance spaces, deep sleep, and interactions with loved ones are Ndoumbe’s required methods of connection in a process they describe as “calling myself back into my body”.

Born in Paris to a Franco-Cameroonian father and a white-American mother, their grandparents’ flat in Paris was the centre of their familial world. Relatives would gather to enjoy their grandmother’s recipes but of all the dishes she made, Ndoumbe’s taste buds particularly danced to the flavours of the Cameroonian specialty, Ndole, made from stewed groundnuts and bitter leaf. Although their grandmother has since transitioned, Ndoumbe continues those ritualistic practices of holding space for interaction and ancestral journeying with food as a vehicle. The roots of their grandmother’s kitchen grounded Ndoumbe in their Cameroonian identity so when they were accepted to participate in the international Forecast Forum mentorship programme, they had the opportunity to broaden their exploration of home within their culinary practice.

Co-creation is an intrinsic layer of Ndoumbe’s artistic existence, propelled by the idea that no dream is made in isolation. “While being somebody who’s also a shapeshifter within gender and sexuality, a lot of how I move through my work is with an interest in connecting the dots between different places because I understand that I’m in a position to do so. I see myself more as a vessel for facilitating certain things but at the same time, knowing that nothing is facilitated alone. So, if my intention is to build solidarity globally with queer and trans people, that requires a lot of connecting conversations and collaborations.”

Ndoumbe is currently part of Utopi•e’s group show ‘Danser Sur Les Traces’ at Sans Titre, Paris (until 23 December 2023) and Praz Delavallade, Paris (1-18 February 2024). And AnAkA’s sophomore project ‘Neurogenesis’ is upcoming. So, in between rapid transitions from one exhibition, project and idea to the next, Ndoumbe realises the need to integrate more methods of radical care into their daily life. In their final reflections, they are dreaming of ways they can form bridges between their communities around notions of intimacy and care, while tending to their own needs. “A lot of it is moving slowly, even when there’s very urgent things happening in the world. I’m making a lot more room for movement because that is a portal that opens up so many other things in my ability to understand who I am in this world. It’s such a fucking binary world that we live in but we have to hold on to the things that remind us that there’s more to us than what the world is telling us we are.”