DTA.SPACE: LEAD FROM THE LAND

Beulah Ezeugo / Banji Chona / Yadichinma Ukoha-kalu

Lead From The Land was a collaborative research project between Zambian artist Banji Chona, currently located in Rome, and Nigerian artist Yadichinma Ukoha-Kalu, who lives in Lagos. Their correspondence took the form of a six-week-long residency built on an understanding of food creation and consumption as a ritualistic practice that fosters earthly and ancestral connections. Through their correspondence with each other and curator Beulah Ezeugo, they trace personal acts of resistance to the colonisation of indigenous food practices. The project is based on the concept of "food sovereignty" as a ritualistic and archival process with the historical and contemporary context of Africa, more specifically within Zambia and Nigeria. "Food sovereignty" evokes a shared process of dependence and exchange between humans and the plants indigenous to their diets. The seed itself functions as a living archive that holds thousands of years of history pertaining to our human relationship to the land and each other. At their core, our food rituals - growing, picking, cooking, and eating - are performative celebrations of the past.

Introduction // [-Twa]: pound in a mortar

“Kamutwa musozya, nobasimbi, tubone naa mwa komena kale // Pound the samp girls, so we can see whether you have become women.”

Kutwa refers to the traditional process in which Tonga women would gather in groups in order to share not only in the labour of pounding their harvested crops, like maize, in mortars but further embody the process of sharing in not only the material but the immaterial which assume the form of dialogue, ritual, storytelling and song. 

-Twa as a collection of pieces mirrors the process of kutwa in its innate orientation to engage in the shared cultivation and harvest of seeds of information collected and dispersed within various digital fields, such as Whatsapp and Google Maps. This body of work looks to explore and showcase the continuity, disruption or transformation of traditional culinary experiences, memories and ritual which are being built and rebuilt in a present temporal space whilst drawing contrast and comparison to past temporal spaces.

Collection:

Digital Collages

Nobasimbi/Tobasimbi

Substance/Sustenance 

Root/Rot

Lifecircles/Cropcycles