To live is to be caught in a Religious Drama — Nicole O’Ike x Lunetta11

To live is to be caught in a Religious Drama is structured as an audiovisual installation in which moving image and sound matter converge in the construction of a reflection on the body as a space of crossing, transformation, and resistance. Through a projection accompanied by an organ improvisation reproduced in reverse performed by Federico Perotti, Nicole O’Ike develops a research into temporality as a non-linear phenomenon, in which memory, identity, and belonging emerge as continuously negotiated processes.

The work originates from a deeply embodied awareness: as women, we have grown up with the disciplining of the body. A disciplining exercised through visible and invisible norms, which, in the case of racialized subjectivities, intertwines with the expectations that skin color carries with it. The body thus becomes the place where norms of behavior, strategies of adaptation, and practices of survival are deposited, crossing social, political, and geographical dimensions.

Bodies in motion, captured with a static camera, narrate the continuous shaping of identities in light of adaptation. The stability of the recording apparatus does not produce immobility, but rather makes visible a condition of incessant mutation. The body appears as a wandering presence, constantly engaged in redefining its relationship with space and with history.

A daughter of the African diaspora, Nicole O’Ike inscribes this tension within a broader genealogy of crossings, uprootings, and reconstructions. Diaspora is understood here not exclusively as a historical condition, but as a continuous movement between loss and reinvention, between memory and transformation. Identity is configured as an open process, an unstable form that takes shape through passage, negotiation, and return.

In this perspective, the body manifests itself as a flame. Cosmogony in action.