“To care is a form of resistance”—on breathing, landscape and repair in the work of Otobong Nkanga

On entering Otobong Nkanga’s solo exhibition,There’s no such a thing as Solid Ground at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, visitors are invited to walk on pebbles, interspersed with boulders here and there. After months in which touching anything, including one’s own face, seemed reckless, the gallery attendant’s advice to “sit awhile if you like…the boulders have been sanitised” is indicative of a new gallery etiquette as much as it is a temporary reprieve from the collective restraint in public spaces lately. I join my fellow masked visitors and sit on an unoccupied boulder in the corner of the room, after wading through the white marble pebbles that make up the installation entitled Taste of a Stone (2010-2015). The difficulty in wading stems—at least in part—from being conditioned not to step on, touch or otherwise interact with art objects in ways that do not involve looking. 

Walking on the pebbles is weird and humbling, and it promptly clarifies the exhibition’s title. Like our future on a planet in the midst of multiple crises—ranging from Covid-19 and a global confrontation with systemic racism, to climate change and the ongoing European border crisis (often misnamed ‘migrant crisis’), which Brussels unsuccessfully tried to “end” with a declaration last year—the solidity of the ground is up for debate. Though set up as a meditative oasis, Taste of a Stone recreates a barren landscape— only a few plants and lichen grow on the boulders. Meanwhile, in Kolanut Tales-Dismembered (2010), a freestanding large-format textile work that emerges from the pebbles, a plant is carefully cut up and displayed in the way botanists might prepare a specimen for study. It is also rootless, and shares the fate of the real plants in the room. Pebbles being hardly conducive to growing roots, it is condemned to rootlessness, much like a migrant held up in protracted bureaucratic limbo.

Born in Kano, Nigeria in 1974, Nkanga, who now lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium, frequently explores ideas of care and repair in her work. Evidenced by the poetic titles of much of her pieces (such as Contained measures of shifting states-Evaporate (2012) in the next room), Nkanga’s research-intensive process engages with how ecological, economic, social and political issues are negotiated through landscapes. “To care is a form of resistance,”  she says, speaking to Gropius Bau’s director Stephanie Rosenthal about the exhibition.  “Without care, the very land on which we live will be affected,” the artist continues. “Our bodies will be affected and the generations to come will inherit the ruins that fill the earth and the violence that comes with such acts.” 

One of the key facets through which Nkanga thinks about ‘care’ in her work is breathing: “In a perfect world, the act of breathing should not be detrimental to anyone’s health, but in some parts of the world it can be,” she remarks, referring to air pollution in Port Harcourt, Nigeria and Dhaka, Bangladesh as examples. “We have to realise that we are all breathing, but not all the same air.” Of course, Nkanga’s point takes on new profundity in the age of coronavirus when the question of who is allowed to breathe and who isn’t is largely predetermined on grounds of class and race—for example, in the US, statistics show significantly higher mortality rates for Black and Latino populations, demonstrating how both air quality and access to healthcare are mediated by white privilege. In this way, the devastating words of I can’t breathe become a global metaphor for social and environmental justice as much as they are a plea for racial justice. 

Nkanga’s solo exhibition is the culmination of her year as Gropius Bau’s artist in residence where, Rosenthal recalls, her voice wafted through the space in song on occasion. This continues in the form of her multichannel sound installation Wetin you go do? Oya na (2015). In it, Nkanga uses sound to react to feelings of powerlessness in the current socio-political climate. Some of the material emerged from Nkanga reading comments on social media in the accents she thought the commenters would have based on their names; the remainder was recorded in a long session in which the artist assumed different postures to alter her voice. The installation is sprinkled with singing, exclamations, snapping and breathing.

Walking through the exhibition, the term ‘anthropocene’—readily used to describe the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment— inevitably comes to mind. In proclaiming a universal, shared geology, ‘anthropocene’ conceals the violent subtexts of contemporary geologic practises: how land is claimed to dig a mine, rivers rerouted for a dam, the flooding of villages, or sacred mountains flattened for mineral deposits. While humankind is assumed to be responsible for these actions, the people (and the animal and plant life) directly affected would prefer these things not be done. The idea that humans, collectively and equally, have historically altered the planet fails to account for how specific exploitative systems, which service particular needs (and wants), are responsible for the planetary crisis we find ourselves in. It is the colonial tools such as terra nullius (no man’s land therefore white man’s land) that displaced people, or declared them not-there in ways that enabled colonialism and rampant large-scale system of extractivism—the ‘pulling-out’ of resources from the earth and from nature— that Nkanga is critically engaging with. 

In her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), Queen Mary University of London geographer Kathryn Yusoff describes Black anthropocenes as “an inhuman proximity organised by historical geographies of extraction, grammars of geology, imperial global geographies and contemporary environmental racism. It is predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of black and brown bodies to take up the burdens of exposure to toxicities and buffer the violence of the earth.” Here, Yusoff is referring to the political and economic mechanisms that expose oil and garment workers in Port Harcourt and Dhaka respectively to the unbreathable air that Nkanga describes, so that, again, some of us can wear-and-toss clothes or drive around in fuel-guzzlers.

Whether they sweat in the coltan mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, risk their lives in galamsey—the illegal and highly toxic small-scale gold mining operations in Ghana— or are shot dead for demanding better working conditions (as was the case at the Marikana platinum mines in South Africa in 2012) the people directly caught between extractive capitalism and battered landscapes, while not directly mentioned in Nkanga’s work, are alluded to in the exhibition. Composed of excavated layers of metal and acrylic, Solid Maneuvers (2015) for instance, represents the emptiness of the land once the minerals have been extracted. Devoid of its natural substances, the landscape has been eternally wounded, transformed into a grim monument to the greed of systemic extraction. It is the miners that extract the resources, but it is those they work for that wound the landscape.

In Manifest of Strains (2018), a circular metallic sculpture from which a glaring red iron tube emerges, glass is attached to the metal in a manner reminiscent of the process of glass blowing. This impression is reinforced by the air that shrieks as it is rapidly expelled from a pipe every now and then. Double plot (2018), a huge woven tapestry hanging on the wall on which a galaxy, a headless body and a severed tree share space, partly encloses the evocative installation which speaks to the interconnectedness of elements and actions. This is Nkanga’s reflection on the ways in which what happens in one area cannot be detached from what is happening in another, and it is instructive for understanding the interconnectedness of the earth and the universe as a single system. I hold onto this thought as I leave, longing for the air that has been rationed by my face mask—a now normalised symbol of our shared vulnerability. But some are more vulnerable than others, and it is this awareness that must compel us to care.  

There’s no such a thing as Solid Ground runs through to 13 December at Gropius Bau.