(Re)Constructing Mindscapes

Before we enter the space, we are confronted with a man-high photograph

on the other side of the wall. It shows a landscape, dry, red soil with
mountains in the background. In front of the mountains there are palm trees
and an old, decayed colonial building, like a caravanserai in the desert. At
our feet we see an old torn-up t-shirt and a broken bottleneck. Different layers
of events in time are there…
I am at the exhibition ‘Unfixed’ at the CBK in Dordrecht were curators Sara
Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy have invited visual artist Otobong Nkanga
(Nigeria, ’74) – among others – to give her view on the relationship between
the post-colonial discourse and the medium of photography.

Like Walter Benjamin pointed out to us in the early days of mass photography:
“the camera introduces us to unconscious optics, as does psychoanalysis to
unconscious impulses”.i A camera in the hands of Nkanga immediately
becomes a tool to investigate exactly these aspects of the environment she
enters. Leading us to the traces of the past, the present and the future, the
things that are easily to be looked over or left unsaid. But it is not the only tool
she uses. Like the drawing, for Nkanga the photograph is part of the
laboratory of visualization.

We go back to the work ‘Memories of a Landscape’ (2010) she created for

‘Unfixed’ and stride into the space on the other side of the wall. Entering the
black room we find the content of her memories; filled with images, texts
written on the walls in chalk connected by arrows, some words replaced by
other words, some words added, drawings of what she saw in that landscape
and how everything spread out in her mind. “Now I remember why I took the
picture of the broken bottleneck and the shredded t-shirt” she wrote on the
walls, “there were a lot of issues in the islands concerning illegal immigration,
so I imagined (maybe) that a man (or a woman) was living in the old ruined
house and tried – he or she – not to leave traces of his (or her) existence”.

If there is to be marked out a beginning of things, it might have all started with
an invitation for Fuerteventura, an island close to the African continent that is
part of the Spanish Canary Islands. At the 1st Biennial for Art, Architecture and
Landscape in 2006, Nkanga felt how the past and present came together in
the landscape she found herself in, and the objects build by mankind. As
ever, Nkanga investigated her surroundings meticulously by looking, feeling,
smelling, by making photographs, restructuring, using her body and even her
voice, to point out to us what has been left unseen.
For the Biennial in Fuerteventura she created a day-length performance:
‘Arrested Moments (Before the State of Amnesia Crops In)’. Sitting on top of
an 18th century colonial manorial house that had recently been restored, on a
towering wooden chair, she captured snapshots of the landscape during a
whole day. ii The 360 images, all consisting of a mountain, a palm tree and the
ruins of an old colonial workers house that remained un-restored, were
produced with certain intervals and printed on postcards that were handed
out to the public. On this spot culture and nature both were witnesses of the
past. A past that was on the threshold of Amnesia, as the old workers house
clearly would not survive the next era where the prominent house of the
colonels would. A past that could be uprooted any time if someone would
decide to erase it from the face of the earth. Only the trees and the
mountain would remain as silent witnesses, for the people would forget about
their black pages in history as time moved on.

The landscape did not only leave a strong after-image in her memories, it also
became a symbol, an exemplary for many stories of her own and those of
others. Her investigation of the aspects that were unseen, she captured by
reconstructing the landscape into a model. The work ‘The Alterscape Stories”
(2006) that came out of this process takes this piece of the earth out of its
context and makes it into a universal tale of creation and destruction.
This time Nkanga puts herself in the landscape. Like a black paper-cut image
she is representing mankind, like the Almighty, taking control of its
surroundings: polluting, uprooting, restructuring and obviously not caring
about nature that brought us there in the first place.
By presenting the works as altarpieces, a diptych and a triptych, Nkanga
might be suggesting to us to build altars for the things that were painfully lost
in time. The active volcano is there, like the scull in 17th century still life
paintings, to refer to the fact that time goes up in smoke and we all will
remain as dust in the end. It feels like she is making a wink to us, a reminder
that nature could erupt at any time and we would have no control over the
forces of nature what so ever. As there will be no view left on reality in the
end, the staged model created for ‘The Alterscape Stories’ was
photographed and then destroyed.

Images of her country of birth, Nigeria, the beauty of nature and the painful
memories of her childhood, have all found their way into Nkanga’s work. Just
as the landscape in Fuerteventura they have become universal stories of
hope and despair, violence and displacement, construction and
deconstruction, entangled in the threads that connect us through life.
In the book ‘No be today story O!’ that was recently published, three series of
drawings entitled ‘Filtered Memories’ and ‘Social Consequences I and II’ are
reproduced, that give us a fabulous set of tools to read the installations,
performances and photographs of Nkanga and the mindscapes that are the
bases of her work. Like the dark space representing her reminiscences when
we enter ‘Memories of a Landscape’, she shapes the blanks in our memory
just as the images that are still there, Black bubbles that float through the air
like the black holes in our galaxy: what goes in, never comes out. But it
doesn’t mean that it is not there. All the rest is connected with dots and
arrows, slivers of images, uprooted like trees; traces of existence taken from
their contexts like root-balls violently torn from the earth. We are destined to
forget, but we have to force ourselves to fill in the blanks, hold on to our root
nodes, and connect to our surroundings, if we ever want to make visible what
would be so easy to ignore…

Nancy Hoffmann

Art historian, critic, curator and co-founding director for the Instituto Buena
Bista – Curacao Center for Contemporary Art in the Dutch Caribbean
Details on the work of Otobong Nkanga: www.otobongnkanga.com

                                                                                                               
i Walter Benjamin – Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, p. 13

ii  La  Casa  de  los  Coroneles  (1708),  La  Oliva,  Fuerteventura,  Canary  Islands,  November  24/25,  2006