Otobong Nkanga: When I was in Nigeria with my mom, we worked a lot with batik-making and dyeing. So my interest in relation to material, in relation to yarns has been from a very young age.
I made this tapestry with digital programming and mechanical weaving. I'm interested in pushing what the technology can do. So for this tapestry, we go up to more than 200 colors and I work with 12 yarns. Preparing the drawing for the computer takes a lot of time. And then while weaving, you need to adjust the drawing constantly. So you're weaving bits and pieces and checking every single thing to make sure the color is right, the type of weave is right.
This tapestry has four layers in it. The first layer, most times, has a certain transparency, so it allows you to see the second layer behind. But then some of the stories are hidden. So what you're seeing sometimes in front could be a plant, but that plant, underneath it, could have something else. I'm thinking of the idea of what is visible is not necessarily the story. Underneath is a whole network.
If we look at social-political life, there are many currents flowing, and there's so many currents that seem dormant. And all of a sudden they become awake. It's this constant cadence of visibility and invisibility. So, how to translate that in a two-dimensional work was what I was curious about.
This is the biggest tapestry I've ever made. But in my dreams, they're bigger. [Laughs] They're big! I fly on them!