#80 The Belly of Momo

The puppet king dies every year and every year, he rises again. In Curaçao’s Karnaval, King Momo, a corpulent figure of collective catharsis, embodies a cyclical truth: temporary structures recur, endings contain future beginnings. Death is not terminus but a transition, and ancestors remain active participants. Past and present interpenetrate; the spirit persists, breathing new form into next year’s incarnation. But here we linger less in Karnaval’s streets but within its interior pulse, in the belly itself.

For Kevin Osepa, the Belly of Momo is not only subject but rather strategy. It grants temporary freedom across multiple time-spaces, a porous philosophy of practice that mirrors Buro Stedelijk itself. Both are interiors of becoming: places for showing up together, experimentation, and holding chaos as sacred. The belly holds contradictions without demanding resolutions: mourning and joy coexist, and carries the resonance of ancestors and their vibrations. Here, the many collaborations that make meaning are held, layered, and woven into being. It is a space where opposing forces need not resolve but can dwell together: where scale collapses, intimate archives transform into explosive color and deep darkness, where whispered histories flare into noisy bodies.

The power of the stomach as a muscular site of opacity. Eating soup together becomes methodology. Communication beyond words, communion without explanation. Within the belly, we are fed; we gather around warmth. This is communication as it exists outside Western logics of literal speech: sensory knowing, embodied encounter, wisdom passed between and among bodies in shared spaces and elastic time. Maternal knowledge challenges myths of solitary artistic genius, insisting instead on art as relational practice, as care work, as wake work, as wisdom passed between bodies in shared space and time.

The many collaborations are crucial with the work of sound artist Rozaly and multidisciplinary artist Lakisha Apostel among many others. While this work bears Osepa’s name, it is also his mother’s: her image, her presence, her thought and touch, her practice is woven throughout.

The project space of Buro Stedelijk itself has acted as belly: a living hollow, generative, sheltering spirits between manifestations. Between this show’s first conception and its physical installment, numerous collaborators have occupied and transformed this space. From small gestures to large interventions, from archives to immediacy of now. Some things remain to be determined; this open-endedness is the method. The belly is precisely where form stays fluid, where the unresolved can breathe. 

The Belly of Momo becomes ritual space where you don’t merely observe but become entangled in Karnaval’s coded visual and affective language. You are asked to slip, to surrender certainty. This is what temporary structures offer: permission not to know, to dwell in complexity, and to trust that meaning emerges through feeling and proximity rather than didactic explanation. The belly holds what ‘formal institutions’ cannot: the space between clarity and opacity, the threshold where transformation begins.

Inside the belly, sensory saturation creates conditions for collective experience: sounds, vibrations, sacred and cursed layered together. You are invited to inhabit it all–joy, mourning, renewal, and the political reclamation of space. Experience what happens when we linger between categories, between endings and beginnings, between what was and what might be. This is an invitation to enter a space where contradictions are not problems to be solved but conditions to be inhabited.

Here, practice becomes political reclamation: asserting Caribbean epistemologies within institutional space, insisting on embodied, non-literal forms of knowing long marginalized yet deeply woven into the Netherlands’ reality. The belly makes room for what has been kept outside.

It is not disappearance but transition. The closing chant: ‘Ayo Momo’ becomes a technology of continuity. A call that insists even erased spirits rise again, endings contain beginnings.

We gather here to make noise together, to cry together, to eat soup together. Not to let go, but to remember how we gathered in the threshold, how we occupied this experimental place and dared to imagine, time and time again, as a collective body.

text by Rita Ouédraogo

Opening Manifestation #80: The Belly of Momo
Free entrance with ticket / Gratis toegang met ticket
November 20, 18:30 – 20:30
Location: Central Space
Entrance: Paulus Potterstraat 13, Amsterdam

Manifestation #80: The Belly of Momo
November 20, 2025 – January 8, 2026
Open daily with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ticket / Dagelijks geopend met Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ticket (Museumplein 10), 10:00 – 18:00

This manifestation is the last of Buro Stedelijk’s co-founding curator Rita Ouédraogo term.