Otobong Nkanga. Anhelo de luz del sur. Photo: Miguel Lorenzo
Jessica Hemmings reviews Otobongo Nkanga’s exhibition of soap with the help of a novel by Teju Cole.
Early in Teju Cole’s latest novel Tremor (2023), the protagonist “decides to use one of two special bars of soap he has been saving. He will use one and save the other forever.” We learn the soap was sold in a dark gray cardboard box that includes the artist’s name, Otobong Nkanga, and that the soap was bought at documenta 14, the über art fair that appears every five years in the German town of Kassel. In the novel, Cole briefly invokes the artist’s voice to explain: “Nkanga had said that the circuit of manufacture and distribution, the bringing into a gallery space of commerce, craft, installation, sculpture, performance, and activism, was integral to her idea of art. The profits from selling the soap would be used to pursue art initiatives. A new foundation, an art space in her ancestral home of Akwa Ibom.” (22)
I catch Nkanga’s solo exhibition Craving for Southern Light in the Spanish city of Valencia the day before it closes. As promised, large blocks of uncut soap and small towers of pre-cut cubes are on display. The stacks, I read in the exhibition guide, are intended to evoke “small towers based on actual soap repositories in Aleppo, Syria, and Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank.” Nearby, hexagon-shaped soap blocks are displayed on purpose-built shelving, with recipes visible on the wood stands. Indigo powder • olive oil • sage butter • laurel oil • coconut oil • babasu oil • shea better • cocoa butter • water • lye – ran the text below a mottled blue-grey block. Other texts are less literal: Asop, aswop, swop, slop / I pick you up / for your to slip away / again and again leaving.
Otobong Nkanga. Anhelo de luz del sur. Photo: Miguel Lorenzo
Nkanga’s exhibition at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern included large woven textiles, a local project with ceramics manufacturers in the region, poetry, several adapted installations that started life in other contexts and… soap. It is the same soap Cole’s narrator describes: “The ash of dried husks, plantain peels, or palm fronds: to this palm oil or shea butter is added, sometimes with herbs, and the combination is cured to create a soft black soap. Nkanga’s soap developed from these traditional methods, though in her case, seven oils and butters sourced from Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean were fused in a final stage with charcoal.” (22)
Nkanga has explained the materials used in her soap making are sourced from various regions that share the resource of oil, inviting us to “think of the oil underneath the sea or soil, or trees and plants . . . what connects, not what divides, and to think about how people are escaping from places that are nourishing the world with their resources.” In contrast, Cole’s narrative uses the soap to veer in a different direction. Tunde baths with Nkanga’s soap and is instead reminded of “how black soap, ose dudu, used to make him unhappy when he was little. He was a city kid and anything that didn’t come in a printed package, anything that smelled like it was made in a village, put him off.” (22)
Reviewing Tremor, Kit Fan writes, “Just as a madeleine can transport Proust’s narrator to a different time, place and self, an osu dudu is one of the many keys that open memory’s door for Cole […] As Tunde takes a shower, the scent of ose dudu transports him back to his childhood in Ojodu, Lagos—the dust and grit that ‘became part of his life’ under a military dictatorship and the houseboy who died of lung disease. Through Tunde’s restless memory, Cole reveals the deep-seated cause and effect of our actions and inactions and puts a spotlight on Nkanga’s art and activism, with the power to address and redress history, and create a future for the local community.”
The ash of dried husks, plantain peels, or palm fronds…
At IVAM, I read and look, read and look, but I don’t particularly smell a scent. There are people in my life who would be relieved—the things I can smell that no one else can tire everyone after a while. In fairness, it is the last day of the exhibition, and the soap has been exposed to the air since the exhibition opened in July. But part of my reason for visiting is an interest in what we may understand, and at times underestimate, through our sense of smell. Last year, I tried to write about how we might understand some textiles through smell rather than touch. I say tried because the writing did indeed happen, but smell, as I am experiencing again here, is an elusive experience to try and share (Hemmings 2023).
Scent has been used to authenticate and fabricate associations: today, batik continues to be tested by some buyers who smell the fabric to confirm whether it was indeed made with wax resist (Kerlogue 2004). In the 1780s, Dhaka Muslin produced not in Bengal but Glasgow was packed with spices to suggest more “authentic” origins (Islam 2022). More recently, I read Victoria Finlay’s brief (these asides are always brief) reference to tweed treated to similar strategies: “By 1857, the fabric from Harris was already so famous that in Glasgow a ‘smelling house’ had been built, so imitation tweed could be ‘inoculated’ with the smell with which tweed was always associated: the earthy tang of the peat fires, in the weavers’ homes.” (189)
The exhibition catalogue in the IVAM bookshop isn’t yet available, but a block of soap is for sale. A patient sales assistant invites me to fold the black paper box I will carry my memento away in—a fiddly exercise that I’m not convinced shares anything of the nature of the craft involved in making soap. But I take the point, my hands were temporarily in motion, my dexterity tested, my patience found wanting and the faintest of scents carried home, maybe not to be saved forever.
Jessica Hemmings is a Professor of Craft at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Recent publications include the second edition of The Textile Reader (2023) and Thinking in Motion (2024), a special issue of the open-access PARSE journal.
References
Teju Cole. Tremor. (Faber and Faber: 2023).
Kit Fan. “Tremor by Teju Cole review – art, history and violence” Guardian Newspaper online. October 20, 2023.
Victoria Finlay. FABRIC: The Hidden History of the Material World (Profile Books: 2021).
Jessica Hemmings. “Material Scent: Textiles Beyond Touch” Kinesic Intelligence in the Humanities (Routledge: 2023) pp. 178-195.
Saiful Islam. Interview with the author 14 November 2022.
Fiona Kerlogue. “Introduction” Batik: Design, Style & History. (Thames & Hudson: 2004).
Otobong Nkanga. Craving for Southern Light. July 13, 2023 – January 7, 2024. Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM).
