At Engadin Art Talks, Otobong Nkanga opened her presentation with a ritual gesture in honour of the late Koyo Kouoh, invoking ancestors, land, and absence, framing art as a space of connection across time, bodies, and worlds. In conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, she reflects on her transdisciplinary practice — spanning performance, sculpture, architecture, textiles, and sound — as a way of working through “bonds and gaps” between materials, histories, and lived experience. Nkanga emphasises long-duration processes, ecological thinking, and multisensory engagement, from farming and soil regeneration to locally realised works that prioritise end-of-life, reuse, and care. Throughout the discussion, art emerges not as an isolated object or event, but as a life project: a means to sense, embody, and respond to the entangled political, environmental, and emotional states of the world.
“We are in a constant place of life and death itself. There is no separation between the body, the soil, the plant, or the stone. What we breathe in, what we eat, what we touch, has been on this planet for billions of years. By the time something manifests, it has already happened — so the question is how we choose to respond, how we create bonds, and how we live with responsibility within that entanglement.”
— Otobong Nkanga
