Jean David Nkot

From the beginning of your career in 2015, your work has dealt with the topic of immigration and the superficiality of borders. Starting in 2020, you focussed on the over-exploitation of natural resources – specifically mining – and humans, serving the market economy. How did you come to focus on cotton fields,  evoking the past and the present at the same time? 

It has to be said that even before I focussed on the issue of migration, I was interested in violence, and more particularly the violence I experienced in my own country. Between 2013 and 2015, Cameroon was going through a terrible time as a result of terrorist acts. I wondered how I could document and keep a record of this period. That is how I became interested in the human condition. The human condition led me to question the notion of space. 

By working on the notion of violence, I represented and froze the spaces where these massacres had taken place, simply by inscribing the names of these places onto my works. At the time, each of my canvases represented a stamp. I used the structure, I mentioned the price and the country issuing the stamp, which I modified according to the location of the attacks. One thing led to another and I began to want to represent the notion of space differently. That's what led me to the world of cartography, and then, by studying cartography, to questions of borders. The subject of migration came naturally to me in this context where I was materializing spaces, dealing with the question of the human condition. As far as I'm concerned, any subject is a good one to tackle, as long as the humans remain at the centre. For me, any subject that reflects a form of injustice is important to be highlighted. This is how, little by little, I moved from migration to economic issues and, in particular, the exploitation of raw materials. So, it was logical for me to tackle the theme of cotton, linked to the past and history. It's a common thread. 

I work on the different forms of raw materials: fossil materials, agricultural materials and liquid materials. At the moment, I am focusing on agricultural materials. When you look at agricultural materials, and cotton in particular, you naturally open up a whole area of human history. This includes the period of slavery and the deportation and displacement of black people. We must therefore ask ourselves what role these events have played in the development of the economy of the Western world today.

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