Betty Tchomanga continues to explore the connections between the personal and the political in her piece Decolonial (Hi)stories #Self-Portrait. Drawing on her family history, her name, and her Franco-Cameroonian origins, she sketches a portrait marked by the silences passed down through the generations and the legacies of colonial history.

For several years, the choreographer Betty Tchomanga has undertaken an in-depth inquiry into the narratives, imaginaries, and histories that connect the West and Africa. The series Decolonial (Hi)stories, inaugurated in 2023, is a sequence of encounters and episodes that unfolds as choreographic journey through colonial history and its legacies. These are always approached through the body, as a lived experience, as a situated history. In her new work #Self-portrait, Tchomanga works her way through her own biographical material. Taking her surname, her ancestral lines, and the incomplete memories of her family history as her starting point, Tchomanga goes back in time to trace the relations between France and Cameroon, where personal journey and colonial history come together. But this journey is also written in the gaps and voids—missing narratives, family silences, incomplete transmissions—where memory seeks to express itself. As Tchomanga weaves words, dance, music, and images together, she draws on echoes, sensations, and sudden revelations to gives a sensible form to these gaps. By transforming the self-portrait into a space for exploration, the choreographer gives shape to what eludes us and opens a space where the intimate allows us to view history in a different light.

Wilson Le Personnic (text written for RCI93, June 2026)