Sondi (1994) is a new media artist from Germay, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands, whose practice centers on worldbuilding and worlding, particularly within digital spaces and video games.

She examines how power and narratives operate within virtual environments, tracing encoded biases, algorithmic discrimination, game mechanics, and the portrayal of people, places, and ecologies, while crafting worlds that foreground marginalised voices and perspectives often excluded from our techno-futures.

Designed as a constantly evolving dream, the game raises profound questions about the potential of the dream space as a place of collective refuge. What is possible while we rest? What do our dreams reveal?

Through play, pleasure, and discovery, ‘Mbombo’ presents Black bodies beyond the logic of extractivism. Each experience and encounter reveals forms of knowledge and ways of knowing obscured and repressed by the legacies of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. The video game moves away from blood-soaked battles in pursuit of glory, favoring unhurried wandering, playful curiosity, and deep connection, abandoning traditional video game conventions based on extraction, accumulation, and productivity in exchange for reward. In the tradition of visionary fiction, Sondi offers in this installation a way to practice a future: reclaims stolen imaginations, normalizes slow wandering, and encourages a probing of our dreamspaces as alternative worlds.

‘Mbombo: Dream Echoes’ features the workshop ‘Imagining Other Futures’ as part of its complementary programme.

‘Institution(ing)s’ is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Creative Europe. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.