In March 2020, when I first started writing about Otobong Nkanga (born 1974), an artist born in Nigeria and living in Belgium, I was sitting in my apartment in Windhoek, Namibia, thinking about the history of Namibia—— Both are related to the global pandemic and Nkanga's work. "Dig a hole that collapsed again" is the title of the artist's first survey exhibition in the United States, held at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018. Refers to the Tsumeb mine in northern Namibia visited by Nkanga in 2015. The name "Tsumeb" roughly translates to "the land of moss", referring to a green hill rich in copper ore, after decades of development, it has become a huge crater mining industry. Tsumeb is one of the most mineral-rich sites in the world: at least 170 minerals have been discovered and cataloged, 20 of which have not been unearthed anywhere else. They range from the rare warikahnite to the newly discovered krieselite to the relatively common duftite. The town and mine were both established by German colonists in 1905, only one year after the German Empire launched a genocide campaign against the indigenous Herero and Nama people in the south of the country. Francis Galton is believed to be the first European to document evidence of the Tsumeb deposit: he is a British anthropologist and a pioneer of eugenics. In her work, Nkangga does not regard the exploitation of natural resources as a metaphor for colonial violence: she shows how the two have gone hand in hand in history.

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The artist's four textile works "The Weight of Scars" (2015) show the scars left by mineral mining on the land and human workers. The foreground map connects ten unnamed locations with white lines, which represent supply chains, transportation links, or the flow of labor and capital. There are two human figures on either side of the map, with a set of arms of different colors on each leg: they seem to be playing a tug of war. The scars in the title are not just scars that were exploded by explosives to attract materials to the surface, but also psychological scars that indigenous and migrant workers are often conquered and exploited when working on land without land. No longer belong to oneself. These scars are also physical; Nkanga represented them in the form of separate weapons, recalling the brutal punishment that took place at the King Leopold Plantation in the Free State of Congo, where local workers were chopped for failing to meet the collection quotas for rubber, ivory and copper. Drop your hands. Dismemberment is a recurring theme, which is also seen in the artist's 2011 painting "The Flow Will Not Stop!", in which a puppet-like pulley system forces the arms to be excavated and constructed with tools, emphasizing the replaceability of black workers. Humanity and personality.

Nkanga’s work has always highlighted the African people and their position in the international supply chain, emphasizing the role of the African continent as a key point in the extraction of raw materials, whether it is cocoa or coltan (used to make mobile phones and other electronic devices). Large-scale destructive projects are an integral part of colonialism's conquest of natural and human resources. The post-colonial economy is not much different from the formal colonial economy. The relics of colonialism link the mining industry in Namibia with the phosphate mining industry in Nauru and Banaba in the Pacific and the "conflict" minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Elon Musk's rhetorical tweet said he would "coup anyone we want" (implying the relationship between Tesla's demand for nickel and lithium and the 2019 Coup in Bolivia), even in 2012 The massacre of strike miners near Maricana in the year was in South Africa, a country with its own history of apartheid mining. Nkanga forces us to witness the topography of these lands and labor, remembering who created (and suffered for) the everyday products and luxury goods that we take for granted.

Whether it is depicting characters or performing, Enkangga has re-presented manual labor, often reminding the audience that human flesh is promoting industrial production. In a video interview recorded for her exhibition at Tate St. Ives in 2019, she described seeing mica on the ground when she was a child at school in Lagos, and recalled how she used sparkling minerals in Paint her skin so that she can sparkle the sun on the ground. She said that the performance allows interaction with different types of public. She performs for people in museums, but in nature, the natural world is her audience-the sea, mountains or trees. Some performances, such as the Green Mountain Ruins (2015) where she sang in the ruins of Tsumeb’s mine, were recorded and used as video installations. Last year, she re-interpreted her 2014 performance "Diaspore" for her solo exhibition "There is no solid foundation in the world" at the Gropius Bau Museum in Berlin. She recruited about a dozen people who considered themselves black or Women of African descent. Each of them carried a night-blooming jasmine—a plant that emits a strong scent at night—and traced the lines and outlines of the topographical map on the floor with their movements. Women buzz as they move, and their synchronicity invites viewers to consider a foundation that is not geographically fixed but is collectively produced. The buzz suggests a language of diaspora travel and identity. The word "diaspore" emphasizes the agricultural origin of "diaspora". It comes from the Greek word diaspeirein, which means to spread and sow. "Daismanite" is also the name of a beautiful scaly or crystalline gemstone, which is translucent, earthy green, red or gray. 

Nkanga’s installation "In Pursuit of Bling" was first exhibited at the 2014 Berlin Biennale and is a clear example of her most critical theme: how African workers are often oppressed by the same capitalist and neocolonial forces. Extract and destroy from their ecology. She encourages kinship with the land instead of a hierarchy. There are two tapestries in the center of this work. A product called The Discovery transforms the outline of the mineral mica onto a map, symbolizing the distance the substance has traveled to become part of various everyday objects. Some people think that the name "mica" is derived from the Latin mica, which means "bread crumbs"; others, from micare, which means "sparkling". This mineral in powder form can be used in paints or dyes, but long-term exposure to high concentrations of dust-as experienced by African miners-is dangerous and even fatal to the respiratory system. The second tapestry, The Transformation, depicts the lower bodies of two people, their torsos being replaced and part of the geometric landscape inlaid with gems, which shows that these anonymous bodies are working hard to extract this valuable material from the earth. Just like mineral resources and the products made from them, the work body is also a fascinated commodity, developed with the same sense of rights as inorganic matter. Surrounding the two tapestries is a metal table with minerals, photos of various geological samples, and a flat video monitor. The video shows the artist interacting with and consuming the extracted product. In the video Indulgence, she put mica in front of her mouth and linked its use in shiny cosmetics to the mineral supplements we consume for health. Her work reminds us that violence lurks under the gleaming glamour that we love and celebrate: many of our decorations stem from the exploitation of the human body and inorganic materials.

In addition to deriving knowledge from anthropology and geology, Nkangga also delved into history, documenting figures such as the late Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The well-known environmentalist Saro-Wiwa is a member of the Ogoni people, whose ethnic homeland, Ogoniland, is located in the delta region and has been invaded by oil extraction and garbage dumping for 50 years. Western environmentalists often view the relationship between indigenous peoples and land as model management, but Africans are usually ignored in this conversation. On the contrary, images of the African continent often show poor Africans living in unsanitary slum conditions or surrounded by garbage—for example, Peter Hugo’s photographic series "Permanent Error" (2009-10), which depicts the dumping of e-waste Agbogbloshie, located outside Accra, the capital of Ghana. Africa is often described as a contradiction between rich resources and scarce materials: this so-called resource curse or abundance paradox has been widely debated and discussed by economists and political experts. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana after independence, called this paradox a kind of neocolonialism, or "imperialism is in the final and perhaps the most dangerous stage." Nkanga's "Delta Story" (2005-06) is a series of 18 works on paper that tells the ongoing oil political war in the Niger Delta. Drawings of burning land, naked people, oiled water, and black citizens facing redrawn and reinforced borders and waterways maps were inspired by the life and work of Saro-Wiwa. He strongly opposes the refusal of multinational oil companies (especially Shell) and the Nigerian government to implement environmental protection. Sadly, Saro-Wiwa was executed by the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha in 1995, mainly due to his passionate campaign for indigenous rights and land sovereignty. One of Nkanga's images "Crying Blood" depicts a child weeping with brown-black oil tears, arousing her people's mourning for the loss of their land, as well as legends, memories and cultural practices that have been passed down from generation to generation. Enkangga's work is not only a powerful accusation of consumerism or colonialism, but also aroused critical attention to the African labor that is the foundation of European and American modernity.

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