Making Ground

Nkule Mabaso: At the time of Climate Forum I, due to technical challenges, you could not give us insight into the work you had produced. Please now describe the work, and shed light on the insight you wanted to share through it.

Kasangati Godelive Kabena: The Made series of performances (2021–23) focuses on the potential of performance as a tool and historical referent. They explore the political status of bodies and their emancipation – beyond just those of human entities. My interest in the corporeal was fuelled by my constant presence in front of a camera (Canon 1300D) between 2018 and 2021, during which I made a series of self-portraits that led to several performance works. The Made performances use a specific discursive framework and production method to negotiate questions of egalitarianism, collaboration, and more. By exploring ideas of democracy and the distribution of power through the performance itself, a self-referential zone of dissensus emerges. Proposing a speculative analysis, the research investigates the political status of bodies and their potential emancipation beyond the corporeal.

We could say that the lettuces that appear in the work I showed in the Climate Forum open a reflection on bodies and how they can be seen. The state of these lettuces – planted, uprooted and chopped – become evidence of hidden events, connecting the lettuce field and the architectural history of KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology).

I read ‘Land Imaginaries: The Gift’ (2024) by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and Łukasz Stanek just after collaborating with farmers for the production of Made 10.11.Łukasz Stanek and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, ‘Land Imaginaries: The Gift’, e-flux Architecture, March 2024, e-flux.com. In the article the authors discuss the architectural paradigm of KNUST and how its formation dislocated an older ecology of agricultural practices. There were many land and farming communities that existed on the site of KNUST’s campus before its construction, for many of whom its building was hugely disruptive. The few remaining farms visible on campus now, fragments of cultivated land, have come to constitute a self-referential proposal of how the land might be, as it was once, used or as Ohene-Ayeh and Łukasz Stanek say ‘the takeover of the land by the university is not an event of the past but rather an event that continues to take place every day’.22.Ibid

The question of land here reminds me that bodies in this context do not always reveal meaning, relations and possibilities. In this sense they are in withdrawal. Similarly, the events they form remain volatile. Therefore, any attempt to address, through art practice, what happened to the communities tends to result in a form of performative operation.

NM: In the work you produced, we see farmers picking lettuce that you then chop on a table. I read the work as an ecological movement between 'bodies’ or materials, those being yourself and the lettuce. Can you describe your approach to the site and the process of conceptualising the performance?

KGK: At first, the farms that are present at KNUST were an aesthetic frame. But my working at one was not a question of using the farm as a site but rather of the farm itself becoming the work. It would have been naive to think of the work as just me chopping lettuce – the important thing to remember is that bodies always form discursive sites. I think of the stages in the choreography of uprooting, chopping, etc., as different forms of relation to objects or bodies. Every stage in this choreography changes the approach to the lettuce. From being planted at the farm to being uprooted, chopped then discarded, these various stages offer ways to direct attention towards the relations between the lettuce, me and the performative moment. This is a way to think performativity not as something that takes place over a period of time but as an event in a single moment, always staged by different, human and other-than-human entities, not in order to be acknowledged but as a political stance.

NM: What role does collaboration – with other artists, institutions, or even non-human entities – play in your practice?

KGK: A few weeks ago, I was saying that I think working with different institutions, artists, entities and so on is a mess! Everything is so entangled that collaboration does not necessarily mean working together, but also responding to what is denied or not recognised in the working process. The Made series questions collaboration as a possibility or aim, we could say, suggesting that collaboration will fail because the self-referential nature of different entities constantly undermines it. Made 10 creates a space where the positioning of bodies always imposes a certain type of event, which appears not only as a presence, but sometimes as a projected proposition, capable of being staged in a choreographic and rhythmic manner. This stage becomes a reference to this event, and not the event itself.

NM: Your practice seems to open alternative timelines, moving between what happened, what might have happened, and what could still happen. How do you think about ecological time in relation to this work?

KGK: What is interesting about ecology is that it holds a form of interobjectivity, refusing to acknowledge time.33.See for example Tim Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Here, the event becomes more relevant than time passing, because situations cannot be relegated to the discursive arena as time-lapses, but rather exist as singular propositions that cannot be grasped and framed. These unseen possibilities that cannot be experienced are what interests me.

NM: What are you currently working on or thinking through?

KGK: I am working on a project that explores reproduction as a process, and how it can be manufactured, through archival images of the Basenji dog from the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo).