Notes on soil & the subsurface: Inga Somdyala’s ‘ADAMAH’

A review by Vusumzi Nkomo on the 19th of October 2022. This should take you 4 minutes to read.

WHATIFTHEWORLD
17.09 - 29.10.2022

Blackness falls perpetually; it plummets without progressing. Its constant momentum is never punctuated by an arrival. Blackness encounters ground, but it does not stop there. The planetary surface is less a bulwark than an opaque and penetrable façade that blackness traverses en route to subterrestrial recesses and out again.

– Cecilio Cooper, Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic

Inga Somdyala, (As Long As I Am Alive) You Will Be Remembered, 2022. Photograph by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD.

The text that accompanies Inga Somdyala’s solo show, ADAMAH, begins with shoes and a funeral, immediately marking its intentions with grief and death. Additionally, the short text, written by Somdyala himself, could be conceived as a rumination on capacity, crisis and catastrophe, death and digging, the soil-earth’s subsurface and Blackness, ground, dust and absolute dispossessions. In it, the artist invites us to a discussion about memory, loss and land, further inviting him to dig deeper for both tactile and conceptual concerns. He writes:

“These pigment-materials help me better grasp at a primordial aspect of the human experience in time and space – to elicit, through their very nature, that which is beyond language.”¹

However, what are the costs, really, of giving in to the desire – or a “want to dig,” as he puts it when one is racialized, which is to say, positioned, as Black? Why dig? And when? ‘Til where (temporally and spatially), if one is doomed to encounter one as always already dead to the cultural (White) imaginary? What do Black people seek to find (about themselves) on the other side of the digging? And how deep can you go?

In Butsolo Beentonga (2022), for instance, what appears like a tear that cuts through the clay soaked canvas – leaving a trail of scattered soil particles in its wake, its scarred and sharp verticality – is anticipated by what Dionne Brand calls “a tear in the world…a rupture of geography.”² It marks, I believe, a psychically-wounding White colonialist-settler conquest – what Somdyala refers to as a “tragic defeat” – whose effects are “beyond” the realm of language.

Inga Somdyala, Butsolo Beentonga, 2022. Photography by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD.

What is at stake here is the gulf that separates sovereignty from fungibility. Or, more precisely, that which locates Blackness as fungible rather than as a subject possessed of a sovereign status (or what Parisa Vaziri might call the lack of ‘civilizational capacity,’ that is, incapacity for World-making). Consequently, Blackness is severed from its “motive will, its active desire,” to borrow from Hortense Spillers. This “willful and violent severing” is the actual expulsion into the depths of the earth, the chthonic that concerns Cecilio Cooper in their essay as much as it concerns Inga Somdyala. I might add that it should concern all Black people theorizing the myriad dispossessions that structure and saturate Black life, be they psychic/internal, somatic/corporeal, material/land and spatio-temporal.

What concerns us here is (1) to trace this expulsion (as hinted at in the exhibition text and explored in the delicately textured works) to the depth, or more precisely, the death, of the earth; and (2) to consider the tension between the show’s Biblio-Christological sensibility (of ascension) against the Black’s “descen[t] into the underground” – the black chthonic, a relegation “to the bowels of the earth” or the “graveyard of the world” – towards which Somdyala gestures through the pair of shoes in (As Long As I Am Alive) You Will Be Remembered (2022). What I’m trying to read here is the decision to make two polar-opposite moves: ascension and descent. Could it be that, as Cooper puts it, Blackness constitutes a “theological scandal” and thus impels Somdyala to interrogate, with refreshing force, both the land-earth’s subsurface that inhibits and is inhabited by Blackness as well as its “thanatological kind of fallenness”?

Installation view: Inga Somdyala, ADAMAH, 2022. Photograph by Paris Brummer. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD.

Further, by identifying this pessimistic strand of ADAMAH, I am interested in the expulsion-relegation of Blackness as the “primal scene of modernity’s genesis,” the world it engendered, and the means by which it granted coherence and integrity to the world’s (conception of) filial and affilial relations (which is to say, the structure of relationality writ large) by way of barring or severing Blackness from the pleasures or “the ontological fictions of the Symbolic.”³ Put differently, I am interested in anti-Blackness’ location in and as the subsurface of Modernity as a pre-condition of possibility for the human drama and life (that is, civil society) on the surface.

Lastly, Somdyala’s use of the language of flags in Isala Kutyelwa Ibonwa Ngomophu (2022), a 27-piece installation, is equally curious and interesting, if not threatening a state of impending danger (if the title is anything to go by).⁴ This work probes, on the one hand, the (il)legitimacy of the stolen White settler territory/land and, on the other hand, the implications of these settler colonialist arrangements and their intrinsically – which is to say, fundamentally – anti-Black logics. Somdyala is imploring us, much like Cooper, to keep digging if we are to carry any ethical assessments of the world we live in. For those ethical assessments to be worthy of their name,

[I]t don’t make sense
Not to keep on [diggin’]⁵