Artist, Otobong Nkanga: One of the things I'm really interested in is our relationship to this environment—thinking of labor, extractivism, connection to the land, thinking of ways of renovating, ways of repair.
Hello, my name is Otobong Nkanga. This tapestry with sculptural pieces is called Cadence.
I wanted to create a tapestry work, which would look at the world in a different perspective and create the notion of a fall—like the fall of a tear, the cadence of a tear dropping. We have the tapestry and the sculptures coming from the top to the bottom, from the ceiling to the floor. And then you have the sound that surrounds it, so you are covering different dimensions in the space.
At the lower part of the tapestry, we have this very dark space with shapes that look like plants, but they're actually a fungus. We have the decay and the seepage into the land. Within that, you have the sprouting plants, so even if it looks like something that is disappearing, it's giving life to something else.
Then, you see this couple that looks at this gaping hole, this mine. There are lots of particles that are floating around, and they're actually breathing all these particles.
The top part becomes more and more heated. You feel things melting. But also it has this fall of water sliding down through the tapestry to give new life. So, from the underworld, to the earth, to the sun into outer space—it's those different worlds all collapsing into the tapestry. That's what creates that cadence of life, because you cannot separate what is happening in the universe from the sun to what is happening underneath the soil.