A-FI-SA. But it might not be tomorrow

Listening for the traces that linger.

Once you leave a place and move through different landscapes, languages and ways of living, you change. You can find yourself belonging to more than one place, yet never entirely to any of them. A-FI-SA. But it might not be tomorrow explores this diasporic experience of double belonging and double absence.

Maritea Dæhlin’s first solo exhibition in Oslo moves between Longyearbyen, her childhood in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, her life in Norway and her roots in the Bamiléké people of Cameroon. The exhibition brings together video, sound, photography and performance.

At its centre is the video installation A-FI-SA, in which Dæhlin and her daughter Nina explore something both fundamentally simple and deeply profound: how to simply be. Nina approaches the world with curiosity rather than symbolic weight, and this lightness affects both Dæhlin and her work.

The grandmother from Cameroon is another voice speaking through her and the work. You have to stand still, the grandmother says. "You have to stop looking for me. I will come and find you. But it might not be tomorrow."

Want to know more?

• Maritea Dæhlin works across art forms, with a background in devised theatre — an experimental practice in which you begin not with a finished script but with an idea, test things out, and let the media and form emerge along the way.
• The title A-FI-SA grows out of Dæhlin’s relationship to Medumba, a language tied to the Cameroonian side of her family, but one she never fully learned. A-FI-SA is not a word in Medumba, but something she remembers and may be saying wrong: a trace of a language that has nevertheless settled in the body.
• The exhibition is produced by Oslo Kunstforening and runs from 27 August to 11 October. During the festival, the exhibition is accompanied by When I See You. I See a Garden, a four-hour collective sound work presented on Sunday 13 September, 12.00–16.00.