Improbable Intimacy: Otobong Nkanga's Grafts and Aggregates

Abstract

Improbable Intimacy:Otobong Nkanga's Grafts and Aggregates Katrin Pahl (bio) As part of a larger research project on treatments of gendered violence in contemporary performance art, theater, and multi-media art practice, this piece turns to Otobong Nkanga's installations and performances in order to probe those patterns of violence within the larger assemblage in which they participate, specifically colonial, racist, and ecological violence.1 Responding to the invitation of the editors of this special issue to contribute to a theory that enables us to notice matterphorical relations and understand their significance, I will explore ways of relating to and connecting with vibrant matter that might seem improbable or even fantastic.2 Assuming that such a theory had better involve a material practice, I argue that understanding and learning from vibrant matter cannot happen in the mode of distanced observation but requires material and emotional bonds—it calls for making kin, in this case with plants and rock. Through the lens of Nkanga's artwork, I will explore what it takes to materialize as kin in human-vegetal grafts and human-mineral aggregates. I propose that these forms of kinship beyond anthropocentrism encourage physical communications among plants, minerals and humans, build resilience, enable less hierarchical modes of co-existing, and offer an opportunity to decolonize our metaphors. What makes Nkanga's work particularly salient for this context is that she does not draw or reproduce a strong distinction between human subjectivity and the experiences, memories, and communications of matter. This might have to do with the pervasive dehumanizing—the degrading of humans to property and detritus—integral to the colonization of Africa, the afterlife of which is a central topic of her work. We will see that Nkanga modulates her interventions in the poetic register with a combination of unflinching exposure and winsome beauty. She draws our attention to the fact that making kin means to contend with stress and pressure and involves alliances that are not freely chosen in any simple way. Otobong Nkanga's artwork engages with raw materials, 'objects,' and 'environments' that activate memories, thoughts, and feelings. What is more, it attunes to how these material objects themselves remember, think, and feel. Such sensibility for what I want to call [End Page 240] "material emotionality" requires a new culture of affect and a willingness to inquire how materials themselves register and communicate their experiences. Nkanga researches the variety of different uses that have turned matters, living things, and milieus into so-called natural resources, explores the multitude of cultural meanings connected to them, and acknowledges the violence involved in these processes. Then she creates new ecologies: alternative networks of exchange, kinship, and communication, which facilitate new modes of mattering, different ideas of value, and novel occasions to listen and respond to the meaning-making of matter.3 When I speak of experiences, memories, and communications of matter, I do not anthropomorphize but base such language on the assumption that experiences, memories, and messages are not just processed by the mind but also physically registered, deposited and communicated. I use a broad and matterphorically enabled notion of communication; this is to say that, in this context, communication includes the exchange of particles, energy, forms, gestures and sensations instead of being reduced to the exchange of intellectual information.4 I am not sure whether anthropomorphizing constitutes violence, but if so, it is not the only violence inherent in patterns of thought and language I have to contend with here and I will do my best to break, twist out of, or reconfigure these patterns (to different degrees of success, I am sure). At other times, I anthropomorphize deliberately to counterbalance the phyto- and petromorphisms I discuss and to support mutual transformation. Plants and minerals are the main vectors of memory, exploration, and improbable intimacy in Nkanga's oeuvre. Her attention to plants and stones, her incorporation of them in installations and performances, and her use of rock and plant shapes in drawings and paintings is not meant metaphorically. Instead, she is concerned with the minerals and plants themselves and reflects on their extraction and global circulation under specific power relations. What is more, with her art, Nkanga creates...