Art Basel in Paris 2025, October 25

Conversations | Summoning futures: Kiddy Smile, Josèfa Ntjam

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Kiddy Smile, Artist, Paris&nbsp; Josèfa Ntjam, Artist, Saint-Étienne&nbsp; Moderator: Christelle Murhula, Journalist, Paris

From the dance floor to the screen, from speculative myth to lived resistance, this conversation brought together Kiddy Smile and Josèfa Ntjam. A star voguer, filmmaker, and 2025 Artiste Associé at Le Nouveau Printemps in Toulouse, Smile brings the energy and activism of ballroom culture into film with RIDE (co-directed with Jérémie Danon) and Mother (made in collaboration with Anne Cutaia). Josèfa Ntjam works across video, sculpture, and AI to create insurgent cosmogonies that fuse mythology, science fiction, and collective memory.&nbsp;

Moderated by Christelle Murhula, the discussion traced the intersections of the speakers’ practices through filmmaking – as a space for assembling narratives, reclaiming bodies, and imagining alternative futures. Together, Smile, Ntjam, and Murhula explored how storytelling – across dance, sound, and digital worlds – can become an act of kinship, of revolt, and of radical re-enchantment. A multi-talented artist,&nbsp;Kiddy Smile (b. 1983, Rambouillet) is known to the general public as a DJ (and judge on Drag Race France).&nbsp;&nbsp;
He is also a dancer, designer, and filmmaker. As a DJ and performer, he has appeared in numerous music videos and films, and received several titles for his voguing routines. He has also performed alongside Grace Jones (2024) and Madonna (2023), walked for Jean-Paul Gaultier (2020), and performed at the closing ceremony of the 2024 Paralympic Games. He was the guest curator of the 2025 edition of Le Nouveau Printemps.
From the ballroom scene to his recent incursion into contemporary art, his practice cuts across various media. His multiple interventions enable him to reach as many people as possible while occupying a unique place at the crossroads of popular culture and subcultures.&nbsp;&nbsp;
In his music, he democratizes and reaffirms the Black and Queer roots of house, reestablishing its substance and political origins. His projects celebrate the creativity and resilience of marginalized people while challenging the logic of social domination and the effects of discrimination.&nbsp;

Josèfa Ntjam (b. 1992, Metz) is an artist, performer, and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film, and sound. Collecting the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences, and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity, and race. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions, and philosophical concepts, which she confronts with references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism, and science fiction. Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages, and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual, and resilient communities.&nbsp;

Christelle Murhula is a magazine journalist focusing on cultural and societal change, and a conference moderator. She is the author of Amours Silenciées: Rethinking the Romantic Revolution from the Margins (Daronnes Editions, 2022).&nbsp;

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