Cassi NamodaMussiro women, Ilha de Ibo II, 2020
Rooted in Cassi Namoda’s ongoing engagement with her native Mozambique, ‘Mussiro Women, Ilha de Ibo I’ and ‘Mussiro Women, Ilha de Ibo II’ offer poetic reflections on memory, ecology, and feminine resilience along the northern coast. Drawing from her long visits to the region, Namoda evokes the rhythms of island life through soft brushwork, radiant pigment, and a palette that captures the subtle atmospheres of sea and sky. In these dreamlike tableaux, women wade through lilac waters, their angular forms cutting through mirrored oceans and pastel clouds. Their faces are adorned with mussiro, a sacred white paste once used in rites of passage, now carrying layers of meaning tied to beauty, resilience, and cultural continuity. Rather than merely depict daily life, Namoda imbues these figures with an elemental dignity, framing them as bearers of submerged histories and living traditions.
Here, the figures transcend the domestic or documentary. They become what scholar Hamilton Faris describes as “feminist aquapelagic relational bodies” – beings in symbiotic communion with water, memory, and ecological care. Their choreographies of labour and song mark a threshold between land and sea, past and future, myth and material. Through the symbolic use of mussiro and the glistening interplay of fabric, skin, sun, and saltwater, Namoda gestures to an expansive cosmology in which the body is both archive and ecosystem. By naming them Mussiro Women, rather than Ibo women, Namoda emphasises their ancestral and cultural agency, reconnecting them with rituals of care, reciprocity, and ecological interdependence that emerge from below the surface, reminding us, in the words of Mia Couto, that they are “inhabitants of an ocean,” and that to harm the ocean is to harm the body itself.
