Spiritus Sancti

To reach the Kasubi Tombs, one must drive five kilometers out to the northwest of Kampala’s center. It is impossible to say how long one should expect the trip to take thanks to the city's notorious traffic. In any case, the large compound demarcated by a reed fence and featuring a large, thatched building is the correct destination. Four of the thirty-five known kabakas (kings) of the Buganda Kingdom are buried there: Muteesa I & II, Mwanga II, and Daudi Chwa II. Until the elder Muteesa’s death in 1885, each kabaka’s jawbone—the repository of his spirit—was buried separately. His exposure to Islam and Christianity might have led Muteesa I to reject this for himself, prompting him to create the first royal tomb inside his former royal residence. Access to the seven-meter-high conical structure is via a markedly low entrance. One must bow—almost to a crawl, a grounding of sorts—before gaining access to the “presence” within. In granting the site World Heritage status in 2001, UNESCO described the building as “an architectural achievement in organic materials, principally wood, thatch, reed, wattle and daub.” However, it was the “intangible values of belief, spirituality, continuity and identity” that were defining for the tombs’ designation.

Rome’s Galleria Borghese has almost nothing in common with the Kasubi Tombs. Unlike the latter, nobody is buried in the polished galleries of Borghese, and the visitors do not come to consult or pay respects to their ancestors’ spirits. Rather, scores come for the paintings, sculptures, and antiquities, some of the finest there are to see anywhere in the world, as locals insist. Yet, Galleria Borghese—not a World Heritage site itself but nestled among the recognized sites of Rome’s historic center—is located on a hill, surrounded by a park, and its proximity to power and an aura of historical legitimacy are almost palpable. It is a secular basilica with very serious Catholic origins, or a plausibly deniable tomb—occidental marble’s final resting place. To access the collection, one must first descend to the visitor center in the cellar. The grounding is only metaphorical in this case, but the relief from the searingly hot temperatures outside is immediate and significant. Admission to the galleries, in turn, is by ascension: two flights of stairs lead up to the first gallery, known for Bernini’s sculpture Ratto di Proserpina (1621–22), in which the mythical Pluto drags Proserpina to the underworld, as the busts of Roman emperors look on. There are many spirits here, too, and they are agitated because they have been cast in stone for centuries.

To review Mutu’s exhibition, I must pay only limited attention to the Borghese collections and focus on the Black Soil Poems installed throughout the galleries. Like my task, my filter is formidable, but, as the camera roll on my phone shows, I repeatedly succumb to distraction. On a mirrored table-top in the first gallery, right next to the aforementioned Bernini, I encounter Older Sisters (2019), two blackened bronze heads, each severed at the neck as if they were Pluto’s victims. They face each other, eyes closed or only barely open. Their hairstyles are a fine example of aquatic biomimicry, evoking two different kinds of seashells with a tinge of extraterrestrialism. They too are fixed in the imperial council’s gaze. In the mirrored surface on which they rest, hints of another work, Prayers (2019), hanging gaudily from the ceiling, are visible, and prayers seem like a good place to start.

Anybody who has seen one will agree that it is objectively difficult to outdo any Italian ceiling fresco: those circuitous works designed to inspire wonder even in the most philistine viewers. It is chiefly thanks to them (and to Rome in general) that my Catholicism temporarily returns every time I happen to be in the presence of one, never mind that even the best ones are usually unapologetically whites-only affairs. Mutu’s wager here is as genius as it is simple: the “prayers”—made of red soil, wax, and wooden beads—are suspended from the very ceiling that hosts the fresco. The play with height, scale, color, and juxtaposition does wonders for a work that would fall almost flat in a white cube. In this gallery, the Prayers are an awe-inspiring ornamental dance, evoking a tingling of possibility. It excites me incredibly to see how this smart intervention has changed the space in the first room already. I feel an implausible kinship with the Prayers, hanging there perilously, simultaneously in- and out-of-place, a bold, somewhat unwarranted presence—because how dare they spoil the view of the ceiling fresco. It is a sentiment I will encounter from my fellow visitors at least twice during my visit, and that I quietly disagreed with then, and vehemently now, in writing. The cheekiness of many of the works carries them, especially in this space—the work is irreverent, the job? Irreverence!

It is still an unusual feeling to walk into a European museum as a member of the global majority and find several references that are so specific to your contemporary experience that it feels like the work was made for you. Poems by my Great Grandmother I (2017) is a mobile sculpture featuring a made-in-India aluminum cooking pot that is the star and main character of every Kenyan—and (East) African—kitchen, the sufuria. The sound of a wooden spoon hitting the side of a sufuria constitutes nothing less than intangible, sonic cultural heritage (hi UNESCO!). It is the soundtrack of our social gatherings, punctuating chit-chat between one’s distant cousins and nosy neighbors as they wait for food to be served at the latest family function. In this particular case, an animal’s multiple-horned skull oscillates in circular motion over the covered sufuria, creating a barely audible sound, an abstracted, sonic poem by a great grandmother that the artist never met.

The exhibition comes to a head in Suspended Playtime (2008). Occupying an entire gallery, makeshift soccer balls known as lifundo—commonly put together using old plastic bags, socks, and rope by kids in Kenya and elsewhere minutes before a match—are suspended from the ceiling. The playful constellation, again, does wonders in the room in ways it would not in a white cube. The contrasts between the tattered, dangling lifundo and the marble floors and paintings are delicious and vindicating. I only read afterward that at the opening, Mutu said, “I am an art toucher and I think it is such a healthy reaction to want to touch art as opposed to not touch art.” I was relieved that I left my friends at home once my muscle memory kicked in looking at the lifundo at optimal dribbling height. I would have had to hold them back from launching a tournament for old time’s sake! The sign not to touch the art abruptly ends my daydreaming.

Mutu’s newest works in the exhibition are tucked away in one of the smaller rooms of the complex. First Weeping Head and Second Weeping Head (both 2025) are suspended from the ceiling and are quickly recognizable as former trees with their roots exposed. Here, they are presented as suspended busts, with facial features crafted with red soil from the tangled roots, which offer a surprisingly effective skeletal frame. Each bust is adorned with an assortment of chains, ribbons, and beads, positioned to mimic tears running from the eyes. The asymmetry is strikingly perfect, complementary, and harmonious from a distance, a sharp contrast to the metaphorical noise and anguish that each face conjures on its own. Their weeping is evident both in the tears and in the furrows of emotion borne of the confluence of the artist’s hand, the red soil, and the trees that have been sacrificed and left dangling for public view. It is here that I am reminded of the Kasubi Tombs, and the cultural contrast of memorializing in marble vis-à-vis cultures whose memory rests on materials that require constant care and renewal. Is infinite memory embedded in permanence, or rather in repetition? Is memory located in memorials or in memorialization? I wonder.

Elsewhere, the extraordinary level of sculptural skill evident in the busts is blown up to full scale in Throned (2023). A solitary feminine figure that quite literally commands authority in the same way an anthill would in the savannah, one’s approach must be careful and considered on account of its ambiguity of form. It is upright, but is it occupied? Is it the stump of a dead tree or ant HQ? How far does the subterranean network of tunnels and other intelligence gathering and logistical infrastructure run? The figure’s surface gleams with matted red earth, and a loose structure is evident, as well as a circle of red feathers and a series of dots that run the course of the veiny wooden structure. The throne and its occupant are one, inalienable in form, stature, and authority, imposing and grand in gesture, yet rooted and grounded in place. This gesture of grounding is repeated (and doubled) in The Grains of Words (2025), the poem that the exhibition title most likely references, featuring letters sculpted out of ground coffee and tea. The individual letters are arranged on the floor, forming the lyrics to Bob Marley’s song War, which was itself a reference to Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech at the United Nations calling for an end to racial injustice. Here Mutu’s material and her choice to install on the floor is almost as ephemeral as speech itself. Yet, the work’s scale is monumental once it has been perceived, requiring viewers to walk the length of the sentences on the floor to decode huge letters, words, and finally sentences at close range: “That until that day / The dream of lasting peace, / World citizenship / Rule of international morality / Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, / But never attained / Now everywhere is war, war.” 

Outside the galleries, Mutu installed some of her larger sculptures. Where the works inside mostly used soil, wood, textile, and coffee/tea, outside it was full-on bronze-mode. One senses that this was not only about bronzes’ ability to withstand Rome’s summer heat. To my mind, it is much more about signaling her presence here. Overlooking the garden is Water Woman (2017), the artist’s interpretation of the folkloristic nguva or mami wata: enthralling mermaids with webbed hands who are said to be experts in luring unsuspecting mortals into the ocean. Here she rests in broad daylight. Musa (Moses) (2021) features an alien-angel with a serpent’s tongue for a tail, and damaged hands/wings half-submerged in a dark liquid in a basket. In Heads in a Basket (2021), four heads, only one of which has facial features, are afloat in the same liquid, while two more rest beside the basket. In Nyoka (Snake) (2022), at the far end of the garden, one encounters the eponymous snake in the largest of the three baskets, curled up and oblivious to the marble busts of historical Italian men that haunt the surrounding park. At the front facade of the Galleria, The Seated III and The Seated IV recall Mutu’s 2019 installation at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which originally commissioned and exhibited the works. The figures are striking for their authority, grace, and poise, and they are the sculptures most visitors come to see. Well before entering the exhibition, they create an arresting visual break to the aesthetics of the building itself, announcing the kind of interventions that are to come.

Much has been made about the fact that Mutu is the first living, Black, African woman artist to mount an exhibition at Galleria Borghese in its 400-year history—a fact that museums should generally be embarrassed to admit rather than wear as a badge of honor. Mutu, in turn, found plenty to work with. In conversation with Galleria Borghese’s director Francesca Capelletti and curator Cloé Perrone, Mutu asked, “Who are the ghosts, the phantoms, and the powerful presences inside these spaces that in many ways are still quite spiritual? … I wanted to navigate the space in a very light, very spiritual, and powerfully internal way… How are we going to hang things in a place where nothing hangs but sits, leans, and is held onto a wall, a place that is heavy, permanent, vertical, masculine?”1 Mutu works with and against the institution—this one in particular, as well as the institution in general—to stake a claim, to open radically new paths for how monumentality and significance can be measured at such a storied institution. In the galleries, the materiality of her work is a clear winner and a brilliant juxtaposition to the marble-heavy decor and Borghese collection, teasing out the hallowed spirit of the place. Outside, her bronze sculptures seem right at home on the Galleria’s facade and in its garden, intruders who came and quietly claimed their place with self-assured presence. Whether these confrontations are generative or are greeted with dismissal is, for the moment at least, irrelevant. Their presence alone is a force to be reckoned with.

1 Transcript of a conversation between Francesca Capelletti, Cloé Perrone, and Wangechi Mutu at the opening of Black Soil Poems.

Eric Otieno Sumba is a writer, editor, and independent researcher. His writing has been published in Contemporary And, Griotmag, Frieze, The London Review of Books, Berlin Review, Texte zur Kunst, and Camera Austria, among others. 

All images: Courtesy Galleria Borghese