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HYMNS
video
(2024)

Hymns (13min44sec, 2024) is an experimental video by Soñ Gweha. The film brings together footage captured between 2014 and 2021 in Cameroon, in the Bassa region, during the funerals of the artist’s loved ones. It explores the rites of mourning through landscapes, rhythms, and the chants of Soñ Gweha’s family, rooted in the village of Ngobilo. Hymns rise, blending with the whispers of the forest, the historical echoes of the slave port of Bimbia, and the Lobé waterfalls.

At the heart of the work is the reappropriation of vinyl records of religious choirs, featuring hymns imported and translated by European missionaries during colonization into Bassa, Bamiléké, and Mangaka languages. These records are remixed by the artist on their turntables, without mediation or translation, preserving the intimacy of the language and creating a space where music and voice speak directly to the viewer. Hymns unfolds like a funeral procession, where the trees of the forest and the waters of the Atlantic sing an ongoing mourning, with reversed tonalities accompanying the departed.


First iteration of this video (shorter version "I'll sing for you whe you leave") screened at Bivouacs 2020, Bétonsalon, Paris on an invitation by Raw Material Company.

This video is screening at the national Museum of Cameroon, Yaounde as part of the “Conscious hymns” installation by Soñ Gweha in the show “Once upon a time, Der Staadt, Kamerun” - 2024-2025