Eclectica Contemporary is proud to present Richard Nattoo (Jamaica) in the Tomorrows/Today Section, curated by Mariella Franzoni.

HOME extends the narrative of The Passage Between Worlds into a deeper engagement with Jamaica’s masquerade tradition, Jonkonnu. In this exhibition, Richard Nattoo, working from within his Jamaican cultural landscape, treats the masquerade not as festival spectacle but as a spiritual system that has carried African cosmology through Caribbean history.

The installation is conceived as a shrine. Within the context of a museum, the booth becomes a space of return: a chamber where the figures of the masquerade, usually encountered in motion, are permitted to settle, to witness, and to occupy stillness. This curatorial frame repositions the masquerade as a living spiritual archive rather than an entertainment form.

Jonkonnu emerged from the complex entanglement of African ritual practices and the realities of Caribbean enslavement. Characters such as the Red and Blue Set Girls, central to Nattoo’s recent work, were historically described through a colonial lens that dismissed their agency and reduced them to imitation. Nattoo counters this erasure by situating these figures within a broader spiritual lineage. He draws links between Jamaica’s masquerade characters and the ancestral cosmologies that crossed the Atlantic: the threshold spirits of West Africa, the Flying Africans of Gullah folklore, and the ancient Sibyl traditions that resonate across the Black diaspora. These connections are not biographical; they are cultural and mythic inheritances embedded in Caribbean memory.

In HOME, Nattoo imagines these masquerade beings at the end of their long journey. The booth, structured intentionally as a shrine, becomes the place where they retire. Here, they exist beyond performance. Their presence is quiet, charged, and watchful. The space acknowledges the symbolic labour these characters have carried as carriers of memory, resistance, and spiritual possibility.

HOME documents the full arc of the masquerade’s passage: its African origins, its Caribbean transformations, and its contemporary reanimation through Nattoo’s practice. The installation recognises Jonkonnu as a survival technology, one that preserved cosmology and community under extreme conditions. By allowing the spirits of the masquerade to rest, HOME creates a rare moment of pause. It offers a museum space in which these figures are not asked to perform, entertain, or explain. They simply exist, returned to themselves, and to the shrine built in their honour.

Richard Nattoo