Parallel to my playing Mbombo: Dream Echoes (2024), I happened to be reading an essay by the art historian T.J. Clark on The Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting, measuring a little over thirty inches wide and twenty tall, depicts three slumbering figures arranged around a tree around whose trunk a table has been fashioned, laden with roast meats, pies, an egg and flasks to drink from. In fact the entire scene of Cockaigne is ample with opportunities to eat, the fence is made of sausages and a pig ambles past with a knife hooked into his flank.
The subject does not emerge out of the artists imagining uninformed. It fits within a tradition of worlds apart from ours that are characterised by plenty, supposedly tactile ripostes to the church’s Heaven that imagine an earthly paradise where the suffering of starvation is solved in the now. (Clark, 2024) Readings of Bruegel’s Cockaigne can tend to view it as a social commentary, the clerk, peasant and soldier chastised for their indulgence or slovenliness. Though Clark’s interpretation differs in that he proffers that Bruegel “the great pessimist” was entertaining “for once the idea of a life free from hunger and terror” as a “model for thinking of alternative worlds – thinking them through, realizing them, dwelling on their substance and detail – without the thinker ‘believing’ in the thought”. (Ibid.)
It is by the light of this more generous interpretation, wholly contemporary worlding model, that I look to the art games of Sondi, a Cameroonian-German artist currently based in the Netherlands who is the author of Mbombo: Dream Echoes and before that Sleep On It (2023). Rest is a central mechanic of these projects, with Mbombo’s opening being an awakening from sleep into a state of persistent semi-slumber. Exiting a metro carriage our avatar is clothed in a pleated bubble jacket and trousers, with a head covering that recalls an astronaut’s snoopy cap. At first we meander through a thick mist obscuring every detail, until stumbling upon another resting place to lay our head until the dawn rises. With the passage of time the fog clears and we are slowly, very slowly by movement standards, able to explore. Though the game implores us to rest, to rest, and to rest again. Treating sleep not as a save-state to be used tactically to replenish health, but as an act unto itself that should it seems to say be venerated.
As a playable landscape companion to Bruegel’s Cockaigne we might see Mbombo as a modern day celebration of the oppressed, the everyman labouring under political conditions that demand an optimised performance. It is also propositional, instructive in its interaction, communal in staging and as Sondi discusses in this interview, legible in relation to legacies of Black resistance and fugitivity.
Side Quest: Before we find our way towards Mbombo: Dream Echoes, I thought we should maybe begin with a wider frame of reference by discussing certain central threads that weave their way through your artistic practice. During your talk at the A MAZE International Games and Playful Media Festival earlier this year, you put forward a case against the disciplinary pressures of ‘Black excellence’ and for the acceptance or normalisation of what you termed ‘Black mediocrity’. If it’s OK could we begin with your position on these terms and how you identify them in media cultures, both beyond and within video games?
Sondi: All these terms are borrowed, borrowed by and from other writers and thinkers. Not so long ago the idea of Black mediocrity reoccurred for me when I was watching the World Cup and specifically when I was watching the French team, which has a lot of Black athletes many of whom are of African descent. When the French team is winning these players are praised and applauded, very much valued within French society and celebrated within the wider Western canon. However, when the French team lost and they lost pretty badly, you could sense a shift in how their bodies were interpreted. Suddenly there were a lot of racial slurs and people telling them to go back to where they were from. (Chatterton Williams, 2026; Issenberg, 2026) That for me is what I mean when I talk about Black excellence and Black mediocrity, the pressure of excelling is that you’re never allowed to fail and when you do you’re completely shunned and refuted.
Another way we witness this is in the idea of the good migrant. The ones who will become doctors, artists, singers, who will add some value to the society in contrast to those of us who don’t have any unique talent. What about those who just want to do a regular job, are they allowed to exist and to be viewed as human? Whilst I think it’s important to celebrate Black excellence we need to push for the space that allows Black bodies to be mediocre, to fail and to try again. For not knowing and being unsure what to do with our lives, until maybe we go backpacking and figure it out.
In video games you see the same pattern. Through my research I started realising that it is in sports games that you see the highest level of Black representation and this is because video games mirror society. In the U.S. there are a lot of Black athletes and those who are able to excel are being immortalised and re-represented in video games. Or they might get to exist as a violent military hypermasculine body. (Glaubke et al., 2001; Williams et al., 2009) But when it comes to fiction then Black bodies are not allowed in those spaces, whether it is exploring some magical realm or is the mundane everyday. Rarely are they given that space of being allowed to exist and being allowed to have a regular narrative that is not extremely stereotyped.
SQ: I feel this conversation touches upon failure, whether that be Jesper Juul’s writing on The Art of Failure (2013) in video games or later Bo Ruberg developing those ideas through a Queer Theory perspective to explore the acceptance of bodies that don’t perform what is coded as successful. (Ruberg, 2019) Would it be fair to suggest a parallel between ideas of Queer failure in gaming cultures and this space you’re trying to carve for Black mediocrity?
S: Actually the concept of failure is very central in my work, because of its ties into decolonial thinking. Fred Moten talks about failure being a way to fuel creativity within marginalised communities. Specifically he mentions jazz as a way of playing music that relies on not knowing, improvising and failing, out of which new rhythms and new ways of composing emerge. (Moten, 2017) Viewed from this perspective failing can become a way that Black and marginalised bodies are able to express themselves and find ways of being creative. It is also something I try to channel in my practice, where I try to take away the expectation of having to make something that’s perfectly functioning and well presented. Allowing myself to see through the failure what things are possible?
“Jazz does not disappear the problem; it is the problem, and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem.” (Moten, 2017, p. xii)
SQ: Turning to Mbombo: Dream Echoes itself, I think it would be nice to start by discussing the choice of gamic verbs it gives to the player. We can walk and we can jog, though compared to the default pace of an open world adventure game our movement feels soporific, not quite heavy but imbued with a touch of drowsiness as if having perpetually just woken. At any given moment we can yawn, there is an option to jump though little to jump across and at certain locations opportunities to rest, triggering scenic interludes. Almost minimalistic in vocabulary the scope of interaction appears as a conscious reduction, could you walk us through the decision making design process that led to this concentration and how you see it acting against traditional expectations of play?
S: Mbombo came to life in two different iterations. It actually started off as Sleep On It (2023) which was my graduation project for my Masters in Art & Design at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. At that time it seemed almost contradictory to want to make something about rest and non-productivity within the medium of video games and I struggle with that idea because the medium holds expectations to entertain us, make us think or make us learn. I really wanted to figure out what certain mechanics I could incorporate that go against the assumption of having to do something while playing a game, which led me to want it to become boring because boredom opens up space for imagination and daydreaming. At the same time I was juggling with the tension that if it’s too boring then players won’t engage with it at all.
The second version that you’ve played, Mbombo: Dream Echoes, is a continuation of that conversation. In the beginning of its development the character could not run at all, but following testing I realised that I was pushing a bit too hard. There is a landscape to uncover and small things you can do, such as finding different spaces to nap, so when the player was restricted to this really slow walking speed there was less appetite for discovering the island because you’d never feel able to get from point A to point B. Because of this, I started to incorporate certain techniques that allow the player a certain sense of curiosity while still retaining a pace that is slow and that invites contemplation. My question became, what should the player be able to do in the landscape? How do they level-up? Because although I actually don’t want them to do anything, I recognise they still need to do something. If you’re not levelling-up by collecting something, killing something, eating something, then what becomes the core value that drives the way you move through the space? And since time was at the centre of what I was thinking about, I wanted it to be time.
Personally I get really stressed when I play video games. For example, in Stray (2022) I really enjoy the parts where you being the cat get to discover the law of the space, but the moment that you start getting chased my heart was going up! But you have to complete that section to move forward. Against those requirements, I started seeing time as a mechanic and a means for the game to unfold. In Mbombo there are parts when you can only progress by spending time. Having done a few play testing sessions I found the sweet spot between keeping people curious enough to see what they uncover and making them invest some time was twenty minutes. Which raised further questions about what I am asking of the player? I ask for their time, I want them to give me their time and I want them for themselves to take this time to play the game and rest.
SQ: For me I found Mbombo interestingly intersected in expectations of productivity in my actual working day. More or less. Because the time mechanism is dripping away you have this sense of places to explore that aren’t aligned with a notion of progress. It didn’t feel strange to leave the game running and go make a cup of tea. I think it incubated a different way of playing because the capacity of time was elongated enough not to feel pressurised. To your point on completionism I wasn’t competing to see everything or collect every location, there’s no metric reference.
S: Within the genre of cosy games, that have very soft mechanics where you don’t have to compete that much, there is still a sense of what you have to do. To put everything away and clean up an apartment. With Mbombo because it is a representation of Black bodies in video games I wanted to give the sense that they don’t have to do anything. Beyond being about making the audience not do anything it was actually also an opportunity to represent Black bodies at rest. Not a Black body being controlled and pushed around to do certain things but a body that is actually just walking and napping. It was bringing dignity to the bodies I have in the game. Which is why I actually don’t want the NPCs to do anything. Talking about this non-performativity of Black bodies within the mechanics as well as the visuals, thinking of the people that are represented in the game itself.
SQ: It felt quite unusual at first to encounter an NPC that doesn’t react back. To only have a sense of companionship through proximity. It’s a diversion from a tradition where communication is verbal and objective laden.
S: My mom speaks French, my dad speaks German, and when they came to the Netherlands to watch a video work of mine it was in English and so they couldn’t understand what it was about. That kind of broke my heart and led me to think about language as access and who I am making the work for, who is my audience, and what’s the language I should talk in for them to understand. I could have opted for dialogue but I was thinking whether I can otherwise convey certain emotions and ideas of togetherness that are very prevalent within the Black community. Even when we don’t know each other we have solidarity. We find space of comfort around each other, which is what I wanted to express without having to use language that might alienate certain people. Rather I wanted the environment and mechanics to talk for themselves and for people to put their own interpretations within the space.
SQ: There’s a line from Marly Pierre-Louis’s companion essay written for The Couch that I have been thinking about. They write that when they “play with rest as a fugitive strategy, it is one that indeed cannot be seen or accounted for.” (Pierre-Louis, 2024) I find myself intentionally misreading that line in relation to Mbombo as ‘play as rest as a fugitive strategy’, to counter the laboriousness of many video games. Do you find an overlap in the concept of fugitivity, via Morton, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt etc, (Harney and Moten, 2013; Hartman, 2019; Campt, 2017) with the type of play Mbombo suggests for the player?
S: It’s very tricky. I wonder if that overlap exists for others when they play it? One thing is the intention of the artist when you’re making the work – which for me involves a lot of conceptual thinking – but then I don’t necessarily need people to think via that academic framework to fully understand the work. Of course the idea of fugitivity and rest were at the core of how I wanted to build the game and the experience I wanted other people to have, but whether this is readable to other people is a question I’m curious about.
For me a big inspiration regarding how the subject of rest is framed is Trisha Hersey and their work on rest as a form of resistance. (Hersey, 2022) However, at the same time, I find the idea of rest as a form of resistance or as a fugitive practice very laboured. We’re talking about rest in video games from a very privileged point of view which brings me back around to who am I making the work for? Ideally it would be for Black bodies to also take a moment and allow themselves a moment of rest. But who is afforded that? And who can even have access to the game is a question I had to confront. I made this game using Unreal Engine and although I am putting it out for free it requires a powerful computer to run the game smoothly. In the future I might shift my own game design practice to work with Godot or a lighter game engine, to help reach the audience that I need it to reach.
“Productivity should not look like exhaustion. The concept of laziness is a tool of the oppressor. A large part of your unraveling from capitalism will include becoming less attached to the idea of productivity and more committed to the idea of rest as a portal to just be.” (Hersey, 2002, p. 100)
Another conflict is the question of when does rest become something that is productive? I like this idea that fugitive practice is almost invisible, because that’s when rest as a form of resistance really starts taking shape. But currently resting as a game mechanic is something I go around and talk about, which is actually a lot of labor for me to do. Let alone making the game which was a big laborious task and remains laborious because of having to continuously update the piece and present it. I almost feel like rest becomes a little performative. It’s super difficult because things contradict themselves. Not everything works and there are parts of it that are failing because they cannot hold all these theories and ideas.
SQ: Is there a paradox in fugitivity?
S: This is the beauty and difficulty of fugitive practice. The idea of rest that’s really radical and outside of the capitalist system. One of the biggest successes when I was doing play testing sessions was the simple thing of seeing Black people trying the game and seeing them being moved by witnessing Black characters in a game in the position of just napping. That’s a very powerful emotion.
SQ: Playing the first level of the Mbombo it felt to me that there was some sense of the environmental design itself fed into these counter-strategies. For example the opening sequence in which you exit a metro train carriage into an early dawn mist felt to me like a deliberate act of restraint. Whilst following the sunrise entry into the world’s wider arena denied an immediate vista with sightlines and hinted locations for perceived exploration. When you were plotting and building out the landscape how were you imagining the player’s experience? Were there any guiding values you wanted to imbue? And maybe related, what informed the specific asset aesthetic, for example the choice of bird-of-paradise plants and plastic lawn chairs? As well as the tone of science fiction that seems to enter through a slightly surrealistic landscape composition and the almost spacesuit buoyancy of the character’s puffer jacket costumes.
S: A big aspect of how the landscape is constructed was to reference different levels of sleep and the healing power of rest. (Patel et al., 2024) To communicate how rest can be a medium to shed some of our everyday troubles and traumas. To recover certain things or leave other things behind.
Where you begin in the metro is modeled to look like the metro here in Amsterdam and this acts as a small clue to say that the character lives within the realm I know, as well as signifying that when you first enter you are in a limbo between reality and the dream. At this point the body is not quite fully asleep so when you start walking the character is very slow and the sound design contains mechanical elements to suggest being still burdened by traumas that weigh down our bodies. Next beyond the first layer the world opens up and you shed certain burdens. The landscape is infused with signifiers from Cameroon – my country of origin – including the bird of paradise flowers which whisper to you. And in the last level, having shed all your traumas your body is light and you start flying. This is when you’re called upon to cross the ocean to the island where you get to find the final place where you can nap, surrounded by other NPCs. All the whispers from the flowers originate from the island. And when you take your last rest your body starts dissolving and becomes one of the flowers.
What the game is trying to communicate is that it is your ancestors calling you through the flowers. Amongst the Yoruba people in Cameroon the place our ancestors go when they die is called Ọ̀run. This is a layer of ancestry you can reach through the dream space and that means your ancestors have been accompanying you along the way. For some people the end level means you’re dying and becoming an ancestor, for others it means you have reached the space where you can rest with your ancestors and belong. I wanted it to be deliberately ambiguous. In a way it reflects the connection between diasporic communities and their motherlands, the journey to find roots into your history through the dream space and our dreams as Black people.
As for the outfit of the avatars and NPCs, I’m very aware that when you play a video game you get to cosplay as a character right? Because of this there’s the possibility of digital blackface and playing at embodying a Black existence. (Marriott, 1999; Leonard, 2004) When I create my avatars I feel a motherly instinct towards them because to me they are representations of real bodies and knowing that day-in day-out they will be paraded around in an exhibition space by different types of bodies I want to give them a layer of protection. A layer of visibility that can also hide them. The puffer aesthetic is protective but also informed by visual references to Afrofuturism and the imagining of a world in which African countries were also part of the space race. They are the traveller, the explorer, the one that gets to take up space and also protected from whoever is watching and playing them.
SQ: I assume that protection against the fetishisation of playing in blackface is in recognition of ways the gaming industry has institutionalised or stylised Black characters over many years.
S: Yes, though this exploitation can go both ways. I don’t want myself to engage in a level of exploiting these bodies for my own work. So I have to be mindful of how I portray them and what is the dignity I give, instead of just being a tool for narrative and storytelling.
SQ: In regard to opportunities to play Mbombo, it has been showcased multiple times including exhibitions at W139 in Amsterdam, Projektraum Alte Feuerwache in Berlin, The Supermarket in Atlanta and in a project between Sickhouse and the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. Plus other shorter showcases at festivals. Of these it is maybe the W139 show Slow Wanderings which you co-curated with Müge Yilmaz appears to be the biggest installation moment. Set alongside a feminist science fiction library, the game was playable from a cushioned platform or by rearranging starfish shaped pillows. Suggesting restfulness as a prerequisite for play. Can we talk a little about those design choices and how you might wish to see the piece shown in the future?
S: W139 is the original installation that I built with my designer Noah Cohen and this is how we envisioned it to be played in museums, unfortunately, it’s quite big and bulky making it hard to travel. Right now it’s actually at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon. I find it difficult to ask people to find a moment to rest when in a public space, so we asked how do you create a space that has enough privacy? Curtains allowed us to close off the space and encourage intimacy between players. Then by asking people to take off their shoes I’m asking for commitment and setting a certain tone, it’s almost a choreography where I try to understand the ways I can make an audience engage through comfort. Sometimes people lay on the mattress and have a conversation while one person is playing, at other times people will have a conversation without necessarily engaging with the game. I’m happy when that happens because they’ve found a moment of rest. It becomes a space for people to gather. As long as we can create a space where people can lay down then I’m very flexible to think with exhibition spaces, museums and festivals of ways we can present Mbombo that doesn’t cost them that much money, that’s why we’ve always found different strategies. Sometimes it’s just a mattress on the floor, pillows or beanbags. As long as it’s a space that feels cosy and inviting.
SQ: We should also acknowledge that exhibitions of Mbombo are often accompanied by staged events that draw a community around the game. Could you tell us a little about the How Can We Dream If We Don’t Sleep? (2024 - ongoing) listening sessions and how it serves as a theatrical or communal expansion?
S: I really like the idea of an invitation to come and rest, so I started curating these events around collective napping and how it would be for people to come together in the middle of the day to take an hour where they get to rest. In the beginning it started off with me inviting some sound artists to have a moment guided through sound where we all collectively close our eyes. Then I had found with installation set-ups that non-gamers can feel very threatened by the idea of holding a controller and playing, so these sessions became a way for me to activate the game, almost a performative playthrough comparable to the way you would watch people on Twitch. I would play live and add narration and invite restfulness.
SQ: Maybe there’s a fusion between the notion of backseat gaming with the positionality you have within a dream, of lacking agency whilst feeling embodiment.
S: Yeah. I think it’s a nice way for me to hand out this invitation for people to come in and nap using the game as a starting point. But to extend it into something collective or communal at the same time.
SQ: Have you considered whether Mbombo would work as a multiplayer game? In a manner akin to projects like Theo Triantafyllidis’s Feral Metaverse (2024) or earlier Tale of Tales’s The Endless Forest (2005).
S: I would like to integrate multiplayer in my future work. Although I, myself, am a very solo-gamer and I’m actually quite scared of the gaming community, I find it at times violent and stress inducing. They can be really vocal and there tends to be a lot of pushback. For that reason, I find it hard to imagine what the multiplayer game I would like to construct would be and how it would invite and allow for rest amongst multiple players. Maybe that’s why the collective napping sessions have become this extension that brings community but not necessarily through the game itself. Also because I find that rest with the game works best when you do it alone at home.
SQ: Final question, I like to close by asking whether any specific games or gaming experiences served as an inspiration for Mbombo or indeed whether there are any games that you’re playing right now that are sparking thoughts on upcoming or envisioned projects, gamic or otherwise.
S: One of the biggest inspirations was Journey (2012) because it is a game that doesn’t work with any kind of language and can instead tell a story through game and environmental design choices. It’s also a very meditative experience. As I was mentioning, Stray was also an inspiration with the presence of in-game mechanics that have no actual narrative purpose. The fact that the cat can scratch the couch and carpet brings nothing to the story, though it adds a level of quirkiness. Finally the other big influence would be Alenda Y. Chang’s book Playing Nature (2019) has encouraged me to start making the environment much more responsive, more than a prop but as an agent within the game. Reading her book helped me think through the ways we engage with nature and to question why all of us are using the same free assets, contributing to this heterogeny of landscape. Which is why I wanted everything to be customised in Mbombo.
Big thanks again to Sondi for taking the time to go in detail about Mbombo: Dream Echoes both in terms of the philosophy behind it and how those concepts find articulation in the game itself. If you’d like to find out more about their practice follow them on Instagram where they’ll be sharing updates on their current Stage IX residency for immersive arts and research; as well as news of an upcoming exhibition Incompleteness as Reorientation with V2_ at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz this September, and bringing Mbombo to Sweden as part of the ATT/BYGGA/VÄRLDAR (to/build/world) residency with Akern this October.
Mbombo: Dream Echoes was commissioned by Het HEM for The Couch with the support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.
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