Cosmic Mandala Ascending Over the City

She grew up between worlds — Paris and the Southwest of France, the Republic of the Congo and the Ivory Coast — and she learned early that the sky looks different depending on where you stand beneath it. In this work, Nandi Makala places a sacred disc above the rooftop of a city that shaped her, stitching gold thread outward from its centre the way memory radiates from a fixed point: outward, always outward, never quite reaching its own edge. The building below is rendered in the tones of overcast afternoons, of European stone and utility wires, of a childhood that was beautiful and complicated. Above it, the cobalt mandala floats — not escaping, but transcending. The gold cords that descend from it, ending in teal circles that echo the colours of river and textile, suggest a tethering: the cosmic and the earthly bound together, neither fully free of the other. This is what Makala means by Resilience — not the absence of weight, but the capacity to carry it upward. To look at this piece is to understand that origins are not left behind. They are threaded into everything that comes after. The gold does not ornament — it remembers. The blue does not decorate — it insists. And beneath the disc, the city holds its breath.