KÔÔ: Libations for Grief (Samples, Spirals, and Sonic Offerings)

Soñ Gweha

14. April - 13. June, 2026

soft opening: 14 April, 14-21h | artist talk: 15 April, 19h

curated by Guilherme Maggessi, Marilyn Volkman, Rafał Morusiewicz

For the Klima Biennale Wien 26’, ENTRE presents Kôô: Libations for Grief (Samples, Spirals, and Sonic Offerings), a site-specific exhibition of sculptural, sonic, and video works by Soñ Gweha. The exhibition draws from the conceptual and material cosmology of the artist’s ongoing project, KÔÔ / ACHATINA / IGBIN: the snail’s queer erotics and the spiral of time.

Gweha’s work centers around the Achatina snail, known as Kôô among the Bassa people of Cameroon, which is classified by the Global Invasive Species Database as one of the world’s most destructive invaders. While often framed as a biological threat, the global circulation of the snail is inseparable from human activity: colonial trade routes, extractive agriculture, contemporary regimes of pest control. Across the regions where it proliferates, humans are its most sustained predators, harvesting, farming, and eradicating it at scale. The snail’s status as “invasive” thus mirrors the asymmetries of responsibility that underlie the climate crisis itself. Reframed as a healing spiritual entity, the snail becomes here a symbol of communal care and a sonic device: its shell used as a rattle accompanying revolutionary hymns, its apex as a makeshift turntable needle. Listening with and through this non-human species, Gweha proposes an acoustics of dissidence attuned to ancestral revolutionary practices.

In the Mbock traditions of the Bassa people, the Kôô is a cosmological mediator associated with patience, continuity, and spiral temporality, for instance in the Ifa traditions among the Yoruba of Nigeria and in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, where the land snail (Igbin) is also linked to ritual offering and ethical relation. Situated within these knowledge systems, the exhibition frames grief—personal, communal, and planetary—as an invasive yet generative force, proposing a space for listening, healing, and ecological attunement.

Kôô: Libations for Grief (Samples, Spirals, and Sonic Offerings) takes place within the Klima Biennale’s Immediate Matters program SPEAK WE MUST WE MUST SPEAK, a collective exhibition of 10 independent spaces curated by Anne Faucheret. You can find more information about the overall program here.

Artist Talk with Soñ Gweha: Of Samples, Spirals, and Sonic Offerings

15 April, 19h

In this talk moderated by the exhibition’s curators, Soñ Gweha will expand on the themes around their exhibition at ENTRE. The event is conceptualized as an open conversation where the artist will guide us through the development of their works through listening sessions and the sharing of work-in-process footage. The conversation will be held in English.