From the Cutting Room Floor: Otobong Nkanga

This is the tobacco! It's just amazing. I think it is more or less like pipe tobacco. Not like the normal cigarette ones. That's really nice.

Mmmmm. We have the coriander seeds that are—I can even hear the sound, it’s kind of—I kind of like it.

Ahhhhhh. Green tea. So you have that.

I like each and everything. I eat—I just fill green tea and clove.

This one. This one I can—Mmmmmm, mmmmmm. This is chocolate mulch.

And here—Ahhhhhhhhhh! Sorry, sorry. [Laughs] We have the coffee. I don't drink coffee but I love the smell of coffee.

For me, it’s very hard to dissociate or to give different kinds of hierarchies to the body, or landscape, or soil, or stone. So the body, for me, is the same thing as when I’m looking at materials, as—if we think that the body contains a huge percentage of water, and contains a certain amount of iron, would contain a certain amount of calcium. So we’re actually in a different kind of constellation compared to, let’s say, a specific kind of mineral or specific landscape, or even a plant. But the plant will still contain specific kinds of minerals. So that composition of what we are is very close to what we find in other places, in other structures.

So I’m interested in that connection of the body as ways of looking also at landscapes, materials, and to play with those materials, and to think of the body as—the only thing is that maybe we have a very direct vocal, immediate—we can say what we think at this point in time, because we have the voice, we have the sound, and we have language.

But if we think of a stone, it doesn’t have that possibility to move itself as we do. Like we wake up in the morning, we breathe, and like, “oh, it’s a nice day,” we move on. But I was—sometimes I consider, could the body of the stone actually be doing something different that we do not know because it’s not part of our kind of language?

But I’m . . . that’s why I think within the drawings, that idea of body, body connected also to other materials, like the body with a plant, the body with a sculptural object around its waist, the body with a stone, the body—because both have more or less the same—or comes from a place where I can see where they connect and where they have, where there can be a kind of discussion happening within that.

So in that way, even if we think of everything that we use or everything that we have or that we make, the body is also connected to it, because in a way, it has to be constructed. It has to break it down. It has to make that materials contain or allow for the body to flow through it, to be in it, to rest in it, to sleep on it, to eat it. So it’s this kind of dependent-interdependency between the materials that we have and the body that has to survive and has to be sustained through those materials that we have. And that interdependency is being expanded through the kinds of works that I make.