Dozie Kanu: The Worldbuilding Tools

 
 

text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods 


Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. 

OLIVER KUPPER A lot of this issue that we’re doing is about biodiversity, but it’s also about offering new tools for existing in the world, which can be utilitarian, but also conceptual. Can you describe the tools you think can be used to navigate our post-pandemic future? 

DOZIE KANU Anything that can be used to contribute towards getting to a desired end result or sense of understanding is what I would consider a tool. When I think about the world post-pandemic, or what post-pandemic even means, I’m thinking about the issues that were already present, but just became more apparent to a wider audience. We all learned during this pandemic, how fragile and skewed the economic structure of society is and also how the system of objects that we interact with every day have made it difficult for people to differentiate between what’s necessary and what’s desired in their lives. It was disappointing to see how our government handled the distribution of stimulus, but it was also disappointing to feel the desperation from people who needed it. Particularly when I think about Black people, the idea of relying on aid in times of crisis from a government that failed to acknowledge you as being human from its inception—it just felt like being in the same boat. So, when I think about what tools I’m using to continue life post-pandemic, I’m thinking about self-governance a lot, and I’m thinking about a scaled back way of living that prioritizes stability and sustainability. 

 

Healthy Minds Must Grow, Watch From The Bleachers, 2020
found ox-drawn plough, pine wood, steel, found Dries van Noten hoodie and colour pencil
Courtesy the artist and Project Native Informant, London

 

KUPPER Like community governance. 

KANU Yeah, but that community can actually exist online. I’m talking more about trying to have much more control of your own living situation—stripping things down. I’m thinking about Andrea Zittel’s set up in Joshua Tree. Or like my warehouse situation in Portugal. Everything’s local. The market where I get food comes from farmers in the area, and it’s fairly low cost. Everything feels homegrown. I’m learning a little about agriculture. We got solar panels. I know it’s not true, but it often feels as though I live separate from any kind of government intervention. I guess I was chasing that feeling. That’s not to say people should give up trying to save the burning empire, but I just think maybe they should prioritize restructuring their relationship to that empire. The famous Samuel Johnson quote that always comes back to me: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, which has been interpreted in many ways, but I take it as a refusal to expect your government to represent you better than you can represent yourself. Like, people really be pledging allegiance to a flag. 

KUPPER Your work often exists in this realm between functional object and sculpture. And that’s really changed and evolved in the last few years. How would you describe the evolution of your work? 

KANU When I first started making objects, I was definitely more apprehensive to thinking about them in a sculptural sense. I guess I didn’t have the language to fully see it that way. My parents are also immigrants, so there was always this kind of practicality in everything that we did that was instilled in me. I was making design objects essentially, but a lot of the ideas that I was trying to infuse into these works were being pulled from far outside of just the simple function of the object. 

Mainly chairs, tables, stools, shelves—things like that, but with a heavy poetic and conceptual discipline about them. Sometimes the gallery that I was working with would come to me and ask me if I could make a custom edition of one of my works for a client—make this in a different color or make this in a different size to fit in this client’s foyer. It was feeling like people weren’t looking at the work. As time went on, I stopped being a little bitch about it and was just like, Nah—I understand that in order for this work to be seen in its entirety, it needs to exist within the context of art in some way. I had to give myself permission to create a different context. My recent work has become even less preoccupied with designating a specific function but I think even with my more “design object” type work, I feel it still requires the same lens or sensibilities that are applied when looking at sculpture—trying to obscure the hierarchies but not just for the sake of obscuring hierarchies, which is what I see a lot in contemporary design right now. 

KUPPER Can you talk about the deeper significance in regard to race and class when sourcing found material and the histories of the materials that you use in your work? 

KANU I would say that the found elements in my work give each piece a sense of place for me. The country, the city, the region—it brings a sense of geography to the work. It implements the stories of the people from that geography. It’s a way to elevate the labor of others and point to specific industries. I naturally gravitate toward symbols of past memories or ways of communicating something that maybe I don’t have the words for. Whether it be the composition of the object, or the shapes that are present on it, it’s trying to get closer to the complexity of where I’m at. 

Bhad (Their Newborn’s Crib), 2019
steel pipes, anti-climb scaling spikes
114 × 58 × 99 cm
Courtesy the artist and 180 The Strand, London

KUPPER Sort of like an untranslatable language. 

KANU Yes, I would say so. Soul spillage. A lot just comes very intuitively. It’s like second nature to reference things that I saw and experienced growing up. In Houston, when you would see 84s or 83s on a slab, there was an understanding that whoever was driving that car was expressing a kind of push back against the authorities and trying to assert value in themselves. It wasn’t always the case, but I usually assume most of them wasn’t working 9 to 5 jobs. As a kid it definitely influences you to want to live freely like that. The Bench on 84s work from 2017 is emblematic of that energy. And I sort of pushed back against the grain in a different way—in a way that was even further outside of what was expected of me. 

 

Chair [ iii ] (Crack Rock Beige), 2018
poured concrete, steel, rims
94 × 48 × 42 cm
Courtesy the artist

 

KUPPER It seems like that piece set a template. 

KANU Yes. For me it was communicating correctly. It could exist in a lot of different conversations, which I still feel strongly about. 

KUPPER I read that you spent most of your childhood trying to ignore your Nigerian roots. And you finally visited. What did you learn about your practice after you visited Nigeria? 

KANU I learned that I'm an Igbo soul through and through. As much as I tried to bury it, it’s fully in there. When I look at the work that I’m making now, then I think about what I was seeing in Nigeria, the culture has definitely influenced me. It’s the way I was raised—finding resources and trying to maximize everything that you have readily available to you. I feel more connected to my parents, my roots, and I want to continue pulling from that, making that a richer aspect of who I am. 

KUPPER Your parents never took you to Nigeria growing up? 

KANU Nah, I had never been. I guess it just never aligned with their work schedule, or they didn’t have the financial means to take me and my brothers home. They called it ‘home’, which I found kind of funny when I was younger. In my mind I’m like, I’m already home! But to them Nigeria was home and they wanted me to see it that way too. But I started making a little money a couple years ago and I just took the initiative to go ahead and see what it’s like. I took my mom with me. 

KUPPER That must’ve been amazing. 

KANU Yes, and it was necessary. It was great timing also because I had just moved to Portugal and I was about to really embrace the idea of living in isolation. I needed to visit Nigeria to give myself that extra layer of understanding my background. I needed to see my people up close. I needed to walk those streets. 

 
 

KUPPER Did you see family? 

KANU Yeah, it was weird. Relatives that I had never met before recognized me. My parents both grew up in small villages and it’s not very common for people to migrate to America. My mom made it out of her village and my dad made it out of his village and so they’re kind of seen and talked about as the blessed ones that were able to find a way out. That’s what most people in these villages aspire towards. So, people recognized who I was just based on them knowing everything about the ones that found a way out. 

KUPPER You were talking before about how the pandemic has really cracked open these sorts of divides in the wealth gap and made the economic disparity a lot more visible. How do you think your current work or the work you’ve been making during the pandemic is reflecting this need for change? 

KANU I don’t think it’s affected my work so much. I have always tried to keep a democratic spirit in the work—understanding that the art world is inherently elitist. But during the pandemic I settled on the idea that I was addressing myself with each work. I’m speaking directly to myself—past, present and future—with heavy emphasis on my adolescent self. Moving forward, I think knowing this will keep me grounded so I don’t stray too far away from the emancipatory qualities that I hope can be located in the work. I’m basically just trying to have more potent, more complicated, more authentic conversations with myself in hopes that it resonates elsewhere and contributes to a much larger conversation. 

 

At The Moment, 2021
Found ATM machine, epoxy sculpting clay, steel, MDF
56 x 46 x 22 inches
Courtesy the artist and Manual Arts

 

KUPPER I think your commitment to authenticity demonstrates a certain level of hope. 

KANU Word, I think hope is one of the most important elements of what artists provide. You’re supposed to provide pathways for others to walk towards being more honest with themselves. All of my favorite artists are people that create the tools for me to truly be myself and to see myself. 

 

Originally published as a cover story in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

 

A Forsaken Place

Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future 

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan, cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 

text by Oliver Kupper 

The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. 

Andrea Zittel
Prototype for A-Z Warm Chamber & Prototype for A-Z Cooling Chamber
1993
Wood, steel, paint, heater and light
Each 84 x 32 x 50 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Since the year 2000, Zittel’s A-Z West—an artwork and testing site spanning seventy acres in the California high desert on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park—has become a template for day-to-day life on a scorched planet. Tucked into the alluvial floodplains of an ancient shallow sea that is now the dust-colored panorama of the Mojave Desert, A-Z West is a new frontier—a homestead—and an “Institute of Investigative Living.” Textiles, home furniture, clothing, food and art-making materials are all made on site. A regenerating field, consisting of numerous steel panels “harvest” recycled paper to pulp to be used for fabrication techniques in the harsh climate. Zittel also lives and works on A-Z.   

Tucked against the rocky bajadas and billion-year-old metamorphic boulders dotted with creosote bush and greasewood, Zittel’s instantly recognizable and portable A-Z Wagon Stations become architecture for future moveable lifestyles. In thirty years, climate refugees (people displaced by natural disasters, droughts, and water shortages) could reach into the billions. These wagons could be the answer to overcrowded refugee camps and allow for more dignified and aesthetically amplified transient domesticity. Plus, their compact size allows these structures to bypass building codes, and they are easy to collapse and transport to the next impermanent residence. 

 The architecture feels utopian, but practical and reminiscent of Jean Prouvé's famous 1944 demountable houses, which were a direct response to Europe’s bomb-battered cities during the Second World War. The need to move quickly, efficiently, and affordably was tantamount to survival. In our human-altered, anthropogenic age, the bomb can come from anywhere and without even a warning or a whistle. Packing up and heading to higher ground may be our only chance. While sequestering yourself in the desert may seem counterintuitive in a warming world, it is in this counterintuitive thinking that makes A-Z West such a brilliant experiment in living off the grid. In the high desert, there are no rising tides or swollen tributaries. In fact, an interesting geomorphic idiosyncrasy of this part of this desert is that the basins have no outlets, so any rainfall collected quickly evaporates in a symbolic disappearing act. 

In some ways, the ground beneath A-Z Test Sites could be called a thirty-million-year-old experiment in extreme topography as a result of intensifying fluctuations in global climates, volcanic activity, and tectonic shifting within what is called The Basin and Range Province. This physiographic region covers much of the inland Western United States, and explains the strange landscapes of these high desert terrains. And deep within the subterrestial geography of the Mojave Desert is a foreshadowing of what may happen to our own living world. Fossils of prehistoric Paleozoic sea life are still trapped in the dolomite and limestone buried beneath the dust. When the oceans receded and eventually vanished completely, elements like manganese and iron were oxidized by bacteria over thousands of years and created something called desert varnish, which coats many of the rocks and boulders in brilliant hues of brown and black.  

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Regenerating Field
2002
Galvanized steel frame, galvanized steel post, vacuum formed styrene trays
Dimensions variable
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

The desert is unforgiving, but Zittel has learned that it is not so much a physical place, as it is a psychological place—a philosophic place. Her Planar Pavilions are an ode and monument to place-based thinking: ten black-painted bricks in various formations, like dancer’s poses, become metaphysical meeting points of the mind. Evocative of the late-aughts housing crash, these planar creations appear upon first impression almost like unfinished foundations to some forgotten suburban housing development lost in late-capitalism’s rapacious daydreams. No stranger than the landscape, these sculptures do not interrupt, nor do they hamper the beauty of the vistas—they serve as friendly borders to A-Z’s experimental community. 

Andrea Zittel
How to live?
2013
Polyacrylic on marine grade plywood panel with steel frame
93 1/4 x 180 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 One of Zittel’s oft-asked questions, “How To Live?,” is answered with A-Z West, especially if we’re imagining a world past the ecological thresholds that scientists have put in place for our natural world. A species that created fire who is now burning the world to the ground must now live with its self-made consequences, and Andrea Zittel has created a radical reimagining of how to live, work, play, regenerate—and repeat—in our collapsing biosphere. This is the beauty of human originality, modernism, and innovation. If you can survive here, you can survive anywhere.