An Asymptotic Encounter with Nyami Nyami

Masimba Hwati 05.12.2025Article, Issue 02

Introduction

An asymptotic encounter describes a meeting that never fully materializes—a brush of energies that lean toward each other but remain apart, lines that forever approach yet never touch. In mathematics, asymptotes define a trajectory of closeness without convergence; in Chidzimbahwe sonic philosophy,^{11Chidzimbahwe is the language and culture of the Vedzimbahwe–Zimbabwean people (those who dwell in houses of stone), who are the diverse indigenous and naturalized inhabitants of Zimbabwe. Chidzimbahwe sonic philosophies are the ways in which Vedzimbahwe negotiate and understand their worlds through sound and listening and sensorial practices.} they resonate as encounters that haunt the threshold of possibility. This is the lens through which the Zebra Collective approaches Nyami-Nyami (2025), a multimedia installation of sculpture, sound, and performance that explores the entanglement of histories, ecologies, and ancestral vibrations.

We move as the Zebra Collective, Masimba Hwati and Michael Gould, emerging in Berlin, 2022, where ritual speaks through sound and activated/awakened sculpture. We carry ancestral memory across waves of dissonance and resonance, shaping worlds in the act of ritual-making. In perpetual improvisation, we dwell in the threshold of past, present, and future—a vibration known in Chidzimbahwe sonic philosophy as Sokunge.

Nyami Nyami and the Politics of Water

At the heart of our Nyami-Nyami (2025) installation stands the serpent river deity of the Zambezi.^{22The Zambezi, Africa’s fourth-longest river, rises in Zambia passes through Zimbabwe and flows into the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. It sustains rich wildlife, feeds Victoria Falls, and powers dams such as Kariba. Serving as a border between nations like Zambia and Zimbabwe, it is also vital to the ecosystems of Angola, Botswana, and Mozambique.} Nyami Nyami, known in Chidzimbahwe oral histories, is a riverine guardian embodying a serpentine intelligence that fluidly negotiates human and nonhuman forces across time and matter.

Through these poetics and politics, our installation confronts the catastrophic social, cultural, and ecological consequences of the Kariba Dam—constructed by the British colonial administration between 1955-1959 to power extractive industries. The dam disrupted the river’s flows, displaced the Tonga and other communities, and exacted a necropolitical toll in lost lives, livelihoods, and ecological continuity.^{33John McGregor, Crossing the Zambezi: The Politics of Landscape on a Central African Frontier (Oxford: James Currey, 2009).}

The Zebra Collective treats histories as living temporalities, using sound, sculpture, and performance to evoke the river as a site of negotiation, rupture, and persistence. The installation functions not as a conventional memorial but as a ritual of listening, creating sound-worlds marked by unresolved proximities and asymptotic encounters. In the words of Anna Tsing, these are “disturbed ecologies” and “contaminated diversities,” spaces where life persists despite, and sometimes because of, rupture and collision.^{44Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).} In Chidzimbahwe folklore, Nyami Nyami shapes everyday ecological and cultural life. In our multimedia installation, Nyami Nyami acts both as a metaphor and as a sonic presence.

Nyami Nyami’s presence informs the structure, rhythm, and spatialization of sound: an echo that affects the bodies of the performers and the audience alike. The river’s shadow stretches across time and place, reminding us that ecological and human histories are entangled in the persistent negotiation of presence and absence.

Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophy and the Fourth Constituency

Chidzimbahwe sonic philosophy positions sound as relational, ethical, and performative. In this tradition, ritual and performance operate at intersections of multiple temporal and spatial registers. Philosopher Mogobe Ramose describes the African being as onto-triadic, composed of Ancestors, Present Others, and Future Others.^{55Mogobe B. Ramose, African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (Harare: Mond Books, 1999).} In this project, we performatively propose a fourth constituency: Earth itself as a living, sacred other.^{66In this report, Earth is capitalized consistently to honor the Chidzimbahwe idea of Pasipamire-Earth as a sentient interlocutor and an agent of history.}

This proposition manifests materially in Nyami Nyami: in Harare (2025), where soil/Earth anchors the installation and performance as apotropaic patterns/scores and a charged, sentient presence, these patterns/scores are meant to counterbalance the destructive anthropogenic activities that offset ecological balance. Soil/Earth also plays a large role in our 2023 installation at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where we set up an iteration of the installation in the 20-foot “bottomless” sand pit in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, which is normally used as a testing site for physical engineering models. The sand pit became an acoustic womb, a bottomless site on which the installation was mounted.

Sculpture, Sound, and Improvisation

Each iteration of Nyami Nyami unfolds as a layered dramaturgy of sound and sculpture. Guitars animated by e-bows, circuit boards of Hexbugs vibrating in bowls, graphic scores inscribed kunyora onto drumheads, and pools of water dripping like fluid Morse codes form an interlocking web of sensory stimuli.^{77In Chidzimbahwe, Kunyora means to inscribe. It describes the cicatrix ritual of medicinal scarification, where salt and herbs are rubbed into fresh incisions, embedding Earth’s elements within the body. Each mark becomes a script, each line a pulse of protection—the body rendered as living hypertext, written in wounds that heal into medicine.} Sculptures serve as both anchors and catalysts, inviting improvisation while mediating the temporalities of past, present, and future. Here, we play a drum set and percussion charged through Hunyorwa inscriptions in the form of apotropaic scores and marks that both guide and affect the player and the audience. In this space, we activate an augmented fanfare trumpet assemblage, its voice extended by a ram’s horn shofar that Serena Lee discovered wandering the streets of Stuttgart at the dawn of spring 2025, as we performed Mapepa Mapepa Mapepa papierkampf with the ensemble. On the Nyami Nyami set, we generate sound from found-object guitar sculptures, threaded with e-bows, loop stations, FX pedals, and other reclaimed instruments, letting each resonance unfold like a story in motion.

The vibrations here unfolded into long drones and shimmering harmonics, forming a sonic riverbed beneath the performance. These tones became a living pad—a drone current upon which the audience could drift, breathe, and listen—as we slowly introduced percussive textures. The intention was to hold the space in vibration, to let sound cradle both silence and movement, allowing each listener to float within the pulse of Nyami Nyami’s flow.

Across five iterations—Berlin (2022), Ogrosen Lausitz (2022), Ann Arbor (2023), Johannesburg (2025), and Harare (2025)—the serpent’s shadow remains consistent: appearing, vanishing, and re-emerging in diverse acoustic and geopolitical terrains. Each site offers a different texture of listening, yet the installation consistently enacts asymptotic encounters: moments of proximity without completion, resonance without full resolution.

Johannesburg Iteration: Technology and Ancestral Resonance

The Johannesburg performance deepened the dialogue between digital technologies and indigenous immaterialities. Sound and materiality converged: the guitar’s drone, the e-bow’s magnetic tension, pedal-based algorithms, ritualized water-song, and drums that echo the stars and sky. None of these elements existed in isolation: they collided, conversed, and braided together. In the process, we performed simultaneous polymeter and polyrhythms with layers of constantly changing timbres, evoking styles from throughout the world and transcending, morphing, and transporting to the other world. The performance begins with a drone pattern by focusing the e-bow on the bass pickup of the electric guitar and smearing it with warm tones. From here, the performance momentarily synchronizes, breathes, and then releases—ricocheting back into another moment of chaos.

Technology as rituals of connection

Our work approaches technology as ritual—an animating practice of connection that aligns the multi-constitutive nature of being with its ecological and geopolitical surround. Our sound engineer, Remember Audio, ritualized the sculpting of an immersive listening field through L-ISA spatial technology. Five overhead speakers traced the serpent’s shadow path, each channel bearing its own sonic gesture—coiling, approaching, and withdrawing—so the dramaturgy of the space itself became structured by the idea of a vibrational path of Nyami Nyami in motion.

This asymptotic movement enacts what Chidzimbahwe philosophy calls Kushuridzira—a trembling alignment of omens, a sonic augury.^{88Kushurudzira (Sonic Vibrational Augur): a Chidzimbahwe concept describing divinatory sonic gestures that anticipate and activate ancestral or energetic fields through vibration, rhythm, and movement.} It produces Shungu: unsatisfied longing, desire that remains unresolved, and the haunting tension of encounters deferred.^{99Shungu (Unsatisfied Longing / Vibrational Yearning) – In Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophy, shungu names an affective and vibrational force of deep yearning, unsatisfied longing, or intense desire. It does not resolve into fulfillment but persists as an asymptotic encounter—a sonic and existential tension that approaches but never completes. As vibration, Shungu resonates between anticipation and absence, between resonance and dissonance, compelling improvisation, survival, and creative refusal. Politically, it signals the restless drive of struggle in conditions of dispossession; spiritually, it echoes ancestral urgencies that propel beings across temporal thresholds. Shungu thus inhabits the field of sound as both poetic ache and generative force, a pulse that sustains life within incompleteness.}

Water drips traveled across the performance space, moving from left to right, forward and back, near and far. In this sonic ritual, listeners felt water approach and recede, as if sensing the Zambezi itself negotiating with human infrastructure. Sound moved beyond the audible into haptic and vibrational experience, a listening body stretched across ancestral, ecological, and technological registers.

Immersive Listening for Artists and Audience

Using Clang in-ear monitors and the L-ISA spatial audio system, performers could configure an immersive, three-dimensional soundscape, blending voices, instruments, and environmental sounds. This created a sonic circle where ancestral memory, riverine intelligence, and elemental whispers enveloped performers, transforming the experience into a shared acoustic ecology. Listening became an ethical practice, engaging human and nonhuman forces, past and future, and Earthly and digital realms, with technology serving as a medium for relational, asymptotic encounters between presence and absence. By surrounding listeners from unexpected directions, L-ISA echoes ancestral, ecological, and more-than-human agencies. It becomes a tool for ritual listening, enabling kushuridzira (vibrational augury), evoking shungu (unsatisfied longing), and inscribing the Earth’s edges as sonic hypertext.

Audio Composition and Symbolism

The Installation was activated alongside our pre-recorded multi-channel audio track, which became a sonic score for ritual and improvisation. The track was composed using the objects on our set—the dramaturgy of the track is based on the symbolism of these objects in our world-making rituals. Here, the guitars armed with spear endpins become ancestral sentinels, suspended drumheads and cymbals represent turbulent skies, the water droplets in the star-gazing pool become fluid codes of summoning all these elements, collapsed into a tactile lexicon. Graphic scores on drum skins enabled improvisation and became ancestral mnemonic devices and cosmograms.

Water drips in the star-gazer pool, enacting otherworldly Morse code, echoing Chidzimbahwe astronomical practice of looking into dark water to see the stars. These tactile and sculptural elements inspired the audio track, producing a performance where sculpture, sound, water, and ritual coalesced into a relational sonic ecology.

Listening rituals

Nyami Nyami explores how sound—through resonance, dissonance, harmony, and rupture—carries stories of kinship, survival, and ecological ethics. The installation frames listening as active, ethical engagement with ancestral memory, the environment, and emergent futures. Sound becomes pedagogy, teaching improvisation, adaptation, and endurance, while technology, indigenous knowledge, and material culture converge to create relational fields where human and nonhuman, analog and digital, ancestral and emergent intersect.

Conclusion

Nyami Nyami vibrates as a Chidzimbahwe sonic invocation—an ever-flowing ritual that listens toward peace with the unfinished. Making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness.^{1010Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), 5.} It trembles at the edge of knowing, where longing bends into rhythm, and silence opens its mouth to speak. In its wake, tremors of nostalgia, memory, and temporal drift gather into one living resonance—a pulse that binds river to body, echo to absence, loss to renewal. Through vibration, Nyami Nyami carries both performer and witness across ancestral and ecological currents, whispering that to sound is to remember, and to listen is to heal. Sound, sculpture, water, and atmosphere entwine here into a sacred architecture—a shrine of listening steeped in desire, in ache, in the shimmer of endurance. Each vibration becomes an offering to persistence, a slow hymn of survival and care. To listen within this current is to approach the unseen, to feel the Earth trembling beneath, to re-member what the river refuses to forget. It is to find peace in asymptotic encounter—where arrival is forever elusive, and yet this elusiveness becomes its own kind of knowing, another coordinate on the vibrational itinerary.

Nyami Nyami flows through time, humming beneath our breath, reminding us that the earth, too, listens—that it speaks in endless vibration. And if we attune ourselves to its frequencies, we might yet learn to listen with the plural life-forms around us, to sense alongside the many biomes that breathe and dream within our shared becoming.

Masimba Hwati (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in Harare and Vienna.