Since her influential 1998 debut feature Drylongso—created while she was still an MFA student at UCLA—internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, USA) has developed a prolific multidisciplinary practice that expands film into visual arts and immersive exhibition-making. Informed by the politically engaged experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, by feminist and Afro-Futurist movements, and by jazz, poetry, discourse, and literature, Smith combines moving image, sculptural forms, sound, and experimental narrative structures to challenge imperial modes of Western knowledge production. In their place, she proposes new imaginaries and speculative futures grounded in Black culture and Afro-diasporic experience.

At the center of this monographic exhibition at Kestner Gesellschaft—her first comprehensive presentation in Germany—is the film trilogy that gives the show its title, The volcano manifesto, comprising My caldera (2022), Mines to caves (2023), and The deep west assembly (2024). Building out from this core, visitors encounter work from the past two decades, including the large-scale video installation …we are running… (2019), a series of drawings of book covers from her research reading list (2024), newly produced textile flags and banners (2025), the hand-poured topological candle sculptures Noncomformity 1-5 (2024), and her ongoing Ikebana videos (since 2010), all set within site-specific architectural interventions. Together, the works unfold complex, non-linear meditations on geological and cinematic time, volcanoes and caves, human responsibility, transformation, and the possibilities and potentials that might emerge from apocalyptic devastation.

The exhibition begins with the Reading- and Listening-Room designed for collective reflection, rest, and exchange. Activated throughout the show’s duration, the space features books, LPs, and custom-made wallpaper derived from Smith’s research on the Pandanus candelabrum, an endangered palm that grows in soil above diamond-bearing kimberlite in parts of tropical Africa. As Smith notes, “I aim to create inviting spaces where people can linger as long as they wish to reflect on the questions raised by the works; for me, contemporary art is an active space that should encourage engagement and conversation as much as possible."