With the solo performance of DJAM LEELII, a Necroromantic (5-9 November 2025, sophiensaele), Djibril Sall created a ritual that conjured up memories of the ocean for all those who have lost their lives in its torrents.
There are things whose beginnings we do not understand. Like the first time someone thought: “this is how we’re going to do this or not do this from now on”. What the impetus, the justification was. Even to this day they seem incomprehensible: not only unfair, but downright wrong. And yet they persist. One of these things is the fact that people die in oceans. Not one or two, not by accident while surfing or diving, but in the hundreds and thousands.
In “The Black Atlantic”, sociologist and cultural scholar Paul Gilroy described the Atlantic and its shores in 1993 as a geographic region that has been significantly shaped by slave trade. Over the course of 400 years, over 12 million Black people crossed the Atlantic. Many of them who set sail never arrived. While they are now remembered on official holidays, people continue to die, for example in the Mediterranean Sea. Well-to-do nations in Central Europe not only deny them emergency assistance, they basically fail to recognize their historic responsibility for poverty, conflicts, climate change, and the resulting global refugee movements.
I think DJAM LEELII – a greeting in Pulaar – is an invitation to submerge ourselves in this circular trap, in this uncomfortable repetitive situation where the horrors keep repeating themselves again and again, like the eye of the storm where calm prevails for just a moment, where we can contemplate it all.
The evening begins with Djibril Sall, lost in thought, seated at an illuminated shrine made of glittering glass crystals strung over a bowl of water. The bottom of the basin shimmers with mother-of-pearl. Water drips into the basin. The rings formed by the falling droplets spread across the surface of the water and are reflected by the light on the ceiling. A prayer chain slides through Sall’s fingers. The sounds of the water and the gentle movements soon calm my heartbeat, which had been racing from my bike ride. And I realize that even the space becomes quite still until Sall puts the chain around his neck.A movement around the water shrine begins, tentatively at first, so slowly that it only gradually reveals itself to be a circle, one which will continue until the end of the evening. Sall spirals from his pelvis up his spine to his head until something appears to come out of his mouth. Spiraling its way through the raw history buried under masses of water on the ocean floor, calling out with many voices.
The music, a single long soundtrack, plays a decisive role, continuously ushering in new voices and moods: the creaking of a ship’s mast, battering waves, but also the techno, dub fragments of a jazz ballad – Black music. At the end of this ritual, Sall himself is soaking wet, his skin shining with beads of sweat. He has been washed over. And I, too, seem to have put more than my little toe in the water when I leave the theatre.English translation by Melissa Maldonado
DJAM LEELII, a Necroromantic by Djibril Sall was performed from 5-9 November 2025 at Sophiensæle.
