The Seeds We Carry (2024)

Exhibition concept, design, and programming by the artist. Exhibition text by guest curator.

The artist would like to thank her family, the many curators who acted as a sounding board in the lead-up to the exhibition, and the Canada Council for the Arts for making this exhibition possible.

Key words: cassava, nature-human solidarities, poison, women’s weapons, food, counter-archives, slave garden, Black vernacular aesthetics, socially engaged practices, architecture, self-care and community care

From the artist statement: “Since 2020, Nnebe’s practice has been exploring the use of foodways as counter-archives of colonial histories. Where official archives inherently bring about issues of accessibility, control, and power, a turn to food as an archive opens up subaltern perspectives and approaches to memory-making with which to re-write history. Nnebe activates these counter-archives through performance, employing what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation – the combining of archival research with fictional narrative to fill gaps left in the archives and, in Nnebe’s case, imagine alternate pasts, presents and futures.

One such counter-archive Nnebe has been using is cassava - a crop native to the Caribbean which was used by enslaved Africans in 18th century Jamaica to poison their slavemasters. Having found the steps for creating the poison in a 1794 botanical catalogue of Jamaica (issued as a warning to British planters as to the threat of poisoning), she treated these steps as a recipe and replicated them as 6-channel video work/performance. Through this work, these steps were reimagined as a recipe passed down from generation to generation for how to assert one's subjectivity in the wake of transatlantic slavery.

A more recent work explores what British slaveowners came to call the ‘thumbnail method’: a historical method employed by enslaved peoples in Jamaica to conceal the poison made from cassava under their thumbnails. The history of this concealment method became the starting point for ‘We Have The Cure’, a site-specific installation of a nail salon within the gallery that re-imagines it as an apothecary and site of resistance. Establishing a parallel to the now ubiquitous long, acrylic nails among Black women, the installation translates the threat once posed by the sight of a Black person with long nails into a contemporary context. Through activation with local Black nail techs, the work references how the nail salon has now become a space of rest, refuge and self-care for Black women.

The sculptural series, The Seeds We Carry, draws attention to how enslaved peoples used plant life to navigate life under slavery. It pays homage to the conjure men and women – the healers – whose knowledge of the natural environment made it possible to transform roots, seeds and bark into poison, healing remedies and talismans for protection, as needed. Here, the vessels in which these concoctions were passed along covertly are cast in glass and decorated with vivid sequins in the tradition of Haitian libation bottles. This adornment serves not only to preserve the secrecy of their contents but also to attract the power of the spirit world. This relationship between beauty, power and knowledge is crystallized in the decorated nails of the ghostly hands offering these vessels up for use, a representation of the power of conjurers who could transform cassava and a long thumbnail into weapons of resistance – for those knew to make use of them.

Organic matters abound within the exhibition, including a bust of Nnebe’s sister made from grated cassava, as well as The land remained the Earth - and the Earth was a goddess, an intervention wherein Nnebe recreates the plots of land given to enslaved peoples in the Caribbean to grow their own food. Within the gallery, Nnebe grows cassava alongside West African okra and hibiscus flowers originally from Oceania - plants that were historically grown in slave gardens and used as food, healing remedies and, in the case of cassava, weapon. Interspersed between these are plants native to Turtle Island (North America) which speaks to the transplantation of Black people (including Nnebe) onto the stolen lands of Indigenous peoples.

Beyond the gallery walls, the exhibition involved a collaboration with Professor Menna Agha at the Carleton School of Architecture to build a community pantry meant to address food insecurity in downtown Ottawa, where the exhibition was held. At the exhibition’s end, the pantry was permanently relocated to an at-need community in Ottawa to continue serving its mission. This part of the project builds on Nnebe’s work in food security policy while in the Canadian federal government and seeks to explore how art can be used to build and strengthen our communities through the redirection of resources and funds.”

Photo credit: Katherine Takpannie, Ming Wu. Abdul G. , Curtis Perry, LenZz, Feza Lugoma, Justin Wonnacott