Orynthia
2025 — Performance, VR
Orynthia (2025) takes shape as a digital and performative ecosystem that explores a futuristic underwater world, operating as a speculative reflection on the fluidity of identity and collective memory in the context of emerging technologies.
The project explores the relationship between natural aquatic ecosystems, mythology, and technology. To do so, it draws inspiration from Afrofuturist currents and Africanfuturism, projecting itself into an imagined future where myth and technology coexist. The aquatic element functions as a medium of transformation, representing both an archive of memory and a generative environment for new hybrid life forms. At the centre of the narrative is the figure of Mami Wata, a shapeshifting water deity, reinterpreted as a character, a digital entity, and a mermaid.
The experience takes the form of a live performance that brings together dance, ritual, and technology, with water acting as the binding element.
Credits
Performance by Valerie Tameu
Lighting and live interaction design by Silvia Parolini with Clone Collective
Music and sound design by Michele Mandrelli
3D character and VR by Valerie Tameu
Tutors: Federica Patti, Marcello Cualbu
Production
La Corte Ospitale, Fuorimargine Sardegna and Residenze Digitali, in co-production with Sineglossa and Codeduomo
With the support of Lavanderia a Vapore
Winner of the Re:Humanism Art Prize 2025 – Digitalive
Dates
Premiere at Romaeuropa Festival 2025 (Digitalive)
Performatorio, Bergamo 2026
Factory Grisù, Ferrara 2025
Metabolo
2023 — Listening session, one-channel video, performance
Metabolo (2023) is the initial chapter of this research, centred on a multispecies relationship of coexistence between the human body, artificial intelligence, and marine ecosystems. The project seeks to move beyond a Western anthropocentric perspective through the use of datasets derived from marine species and the reinterpretation of Indigenous practices.
The technological core of the project is based on a connection to the waters surrounding Frying Pan Tower (North Carolina), where an underwater webcam captures images of marine life in its natural habitat. Through machine learning, artificial intelligence analyses in real time the movements and density of the oceanic world, translating this data into an ever-evolving soundscape.
During the performance, this triangulation between the human, the machine, and more-than-human beings allows the artist to shape sound through movement, creating an ecosystem of mutual influence between technology and nature. Here, the artist-performer’s body enters as a material and ritual element, drawing on the figure of the mermaid.
Installation and performance by Valerie Tameu
Sound design and software development by Michele Mandrelli
Software developer: Michele Cremaschi
Tutoring: Federica Patti
Costume design by Augusta Tibaldeschi
Marine biologist consultant: Agnese Riccardi
Sineglossa, co-produced with Codeduomo
Partners: Lavanderia a Vapore
With the support of Libera Università di Bolzano, Lavanderia a Vapore and Ars Electronica
Dates
Presented at Ars Electronica 2023 and in various choreographic and artistic research contexts.
Time and Again
2024 — Performative installation
Time and Again took shape at Centrale Fies for Live Works 2024, supported by the Agitu Ideo Gudeta research grant. At its core is the ambition to create a living, poetic archive that explores Afro-descendant memory through visual and sonic materials, evoking its dreamlike essence.
More than documentation, it embodies learned practices — oral traditions, gestures, and intergenerational memory. A performative installation intertwining projections on moving fabrics, sound, and air, it transforms memory into an immersive, kinetic experience.
Images drawn from Afro-descendant archives dissolve and reassemble through videomapping, while lullabies and proverbs evolve into abstract soundscapes. Wind itself becomes dramaturgy, animating voices and visuals. The body, present or absent, acts as a living archive, mediating between fragmentation and belonging, between remembering and reimagining.
Concept, choreography and installation by Valerie Tameu
Supported by the Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship
Dates
Live Works Summit 2024, Centrale Fies (Dro), 19 July 2024
An interview on Time and Again was published in L’Espresso.
Read the intervie
Studio 1. I Miss You So Much!
2023 — Installation, single-channel video
I Miss You So Much! creates a spatial installation where the artist gathers poetry, personal archival objects, and photographs to investigate Turin’s recent industrial history and its migratory movements. The work activates a communal remembrance of Black and working-class life in 1980s Turin. With a poetic focus on transience, Tameu traces her family’s migration journey from Calabria and Cameroon, examining how memories are constructed through both personal and institutional archives.
In her single-channel video work, the artist navigates the currents of memory and imagination, grappling with key historical events and their significance. The displayed photographs and personal objects depict fragments of shattered dreams and urban landscapes tied to her personal and family history, such as the Fiat Mirafiori factory and its surroundings.
Tameu investigates which aspects endure over time and which are discarded, reflecting on the value of memory reproduction and the construction of personal identity through representation. The audience is invited to inspect and physically engage with the exhibited elements, which embody ephemerality, memory, and the archive as interconnected forms of expression.
Solo exhibition, Hoxton Arches, London 2023. Produced and commissioned by SPAZIO GRIOT and the Italian Cultural Institute in London.
Part of the group exhibition Our Rivers Share a Mouth, 18th Young Curators Residency Programme Torino (YCRP), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Curated by Jiayue He, Andria Nyberg Forshage and Aigerim Kapar (May–July 2024).
Credits
Curatorial statement by Johanne Affricot
Photography: Giorgio Andreoni
Italian Cultural Institute, London.
Poems printed on transparent paper, 21 × 15 cm
Photographs on printed paper with frames, 40 × 60 cm
Prints on playing cards
Roller skates, clothes, book
Single-channel video
Courtesy of the artist, SPAZIO GRIOT and the Italian Cultural Institute in London. Archive materials courtesy of Polo del ’00.
Dove Hanno Tremato le Placche
2023 — Performance, video, archival research
Dove Hanno Tremato le Placche (2023) is a multidisciplinary performance intertwining memory, archive, and body in an intimate ritual of confronting the past. Drawing from the artist’s photographic archives and her family’s migrations from Cameroon and Calabria to the working-class Turin of the 1980s, the work explores the fragile balance between what is remembered and what is destined to be lost.
Through dance, narration, and archival fragments, the performance reconstructs a landscape suspended between history and imagination, where the body becomes a witness to encounters and absences. The performative gesture becomes both a childhood game and an act of resistance, evoking uncanny presences and forgotten objects, while personal memory intertwines with the labour struggles and migrations that shaped Turin.
Developed through historical research and engagement with institutional archives and local communities, the work collectively reworks the traces of a fragmented past, transforming memory into a shared and living experience.
The project takes the shape of historical research, workshop, and performance. It stems from an artistic practice of archiving and affective mapping, drawing on the artist’s personal collection of archival photographs. Taking her family’s migration to Turin as a point of departure, the work explores the city between 1980 and 1981, when working-class life in the Fiat Mirafiori factories and trade union struggles coincided with her parents’ migration from Calabria and post-colonial Cameroon.
Between April and June 2023, the artist engaged with other performance practitioners, exploring workshop methodologies and alternative archival practices alongside performer, activist and researcher Ilenia Caleo, and with the archivists of the Fondazione Istituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci and the Fondazione Vera Nocentini at Polo del ’900.
Polo del ’00, Turin
Teatro La Pelanda, Rome — Festival Rifrazioni
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato 2024
Lavanderia a Vapore, Turin
BASE Milano
Interazioni Festival, Rome
Vibrant Bodies & Sonic Bloom
Workshop — Somatic seas and visionary currents
A transdisciplinary laboratory of somatic practices and collective rituality, interweaving somatic research, political philosophy, and collective ritual practices. The project explores the body as a “liquid archive”, capable of holding memory and generating new forms of resistance through sound, movement, and resonance.
The research begins from a perspective that sees the body not as an isolated entity, but as a “vibrant environment”, traversed by histories and forces. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s concept of the Wake, the work investigates how bodies carry the marks of historical passages and collective trauma, transforming them into creative and vital momentum.
Vibrant Bodies develops from a reflection on the relationship between aquatic worlds, spirituality, and forms of socio-political resistance linked to Black feminism — arriving at somatic practice as a way of engaging the body in its capacity to create new spaces. Water becomes a bridge between historical memory and future speculation.
Immersion is always preceded by a slowing down. Frenetic speed — the speed of motorboats, the rhythm of capitalism — is a cause of the pollution that prevents the seas from breathing. To dive, one must slow down. The grey seal lowers its heart rate from 120 to 4 beats per minute as it descends to a depth of 450 metres, conserving oxygen. It slows down and enters silence.
The laboratory proposes a journey through a somatic practice connected to the “stirring of waters” within our tissues and imagination: movements of shaking, bubbling, bouncing, and rhythm that culminate in a session of ecstatic dance inspired by trance states.
Sonic Bloom
The culmination of the laboratory: a contemporary ritual of ecstasy where dance becomes a tool for care and connection. Collective trance and shared resonance turn the space into a living organism — a liquid collectivity, a temporary architecture made of bodies, rhythms, and breaths.
Albertina Academy of Fine Arts, Turin 2026
Electropark Festival, Genoa 2025
Polo del ’00, Turin 2025
Dark Matters — Lavanderia a Vapore, Turin 2024
Supernova Festival, Rimini 2024
Le Alleanze dei Corpi Festival, Milan 2024
Reference
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Contact
e-mail:
tameu.val89@gmail.com
valerie.tameu@libero.it