The way Zora Snake speaks of her exploration with a party from the artistic team of Combat des lianes, in the East of Cameroon, in January 2025 among the Baka communities says much about the way she creates. It recounts here this state of travelling towards another state of perception, where the songs and the whistling can be heard, specifically within a liana world, where all is relationship.

For the Baka communities, it is vitally important to welcome people from elsewhere, whom they do not judge as ‘different’.  When someone arrives in a village, everyone is immediately alerted by calls, whistles and the sound of musical instruments. Families, the women with their children, gather and form a circle. Polyphonic singing breaks out, the rhythm of percussion, clapping. They invited us to enter the circle, and create a kind of umbilical cord, connected and connecting the communities. An invocation of the spirit of the liana.

After the gathering, the tom-tom sounds, and continues in its vibrations. In Combat des lianes, also, the tom-tom hangs over two metres above the ground, to produce a very intense, reverberant sound. This is to show how the spirit is lifted up by song (the voice, the melody), dance and the musical instrument. That’s the rule of three.

Most of the time, it is the women who create the symphony, both rhythmic and arrhythmic, spontaneously and in the circle. This evokes the snake, the spiral, the rhythm of reincarnation or of the universe - the cosmogony of the globe that we are. We are seeking within ourselves. The liana is inside us. We are the liana.

In Combat des lianes, the musical framework is very organic, composed, among other things, of songs of anger in the face of deforestation. The trees are souls. When a tree falls, it is a soul that is fleeing away. In the Baka communities, the bodies of patriarchs are buried among the trees. That's why, ‘to cut down a tree’, and ‘carry it away in a container’, means twice killing the ancestral heritage of the Baka communities.

The man seen here dazzled us with his dancing. First of all, he came with nothing, he danced until he entered a trance. Then he went to seek what he was missing. He reappeared “transformed”, his face blackened. The remedy covered his entire face. His grandparents worked the bark of trees, to treat human beings. They bequeathed him the remedy to protect himself from people he did not know, during the ceremony. As we are not wicked, exploitative spirits, the ancestors of the Baka communities did not block the voice or the sight from us.

The children are seated among the roots. They watch us. The image makes us think about what is passed on from generation to generation: the links with the forest and the ancestors.  We asked the Baka communities: what is the sacred forest? They answered us: the forest does not exist. It exists in each one of us. The forest is us. We form part of the aquatic, plant, and aerial worlds - which we consume.  The forest is peopled with living beings and living spirits.  Hence the words we have often heard in the villages, and which we also hear in Combat des lianes: “The forest is us. We are the forest

— Interview by Sylvia Botella