Performative artist Domingos de Menezes Miguel stages power through a repertoire of constructed personae that are often grotesque, stylized, and symbolically charged. Mussunda N’zombo, his satirical alter ego, currently functions as the artist’s primary public identity. N’zombo, a gold-clad figure of inflated authority, is flanked by bodyguards and known for delivering ‘presidential’ addresses from atop moving vehicles or inside golden cages. First developed in collaboration with artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, Mussunda draws on the iconographies of strongmen like Mobutu Sese Seko and Muammar al-Gaddafi. Yet his actual material is drawn from the theatrical afterlives of post-independence politics, where revolutionary promise curdles into ritual, performativity, and luxury. Born in Luanda and shaped by two decades of living in Germany, N’zombo explores how postcolonial authority is embodied and aestheticized. Another character, Mwata, circulates elite spaces, addressing restitution and cultural sovereignty with diplomatic poise. Mussunda, by contrast, inhabits the register of public spectacle, moving through civic space with banga and bravado. He has already declared himself future president of the 2072–77 legislature. The character Nguvulo Marimbondo unsettles this binary. Neither contained nor explosive, he occupies the space between complicity and critique. As a self-implicated marimbondo—a term for Angola’s corrupt elite—he is both perpetrator and whistleblower. In Salalé (2022), he attempted to return stolen Angolan state assets, framing accountability as spectacle from within the system. N’zombo’s work doesn’t offer safe satire. His personae are not disguises but devices. They push the visual grammar of authority to its limits—not to parody power, but to mirror it, revealing a reality already steeped in its own absurdity.

With the kind support of Goethe-Institut Angola

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION: O IM-PACTO 2/THE IM-PACT 2 (2018–22), photographs documenting a performance series, dimensions variable. Photos: Ngoi Salucombo, Luís Damião, Hélio Buite, Lee Bogotá, Bruno Fonseca, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Geração 80, Artur Silva (Câmara Vagabunda). Courtesy of the artist