Life in Ruins. Thinking through the geological reformation of the human subject with Otobong Nkanga's Remains of the Green Hill.

Abstract

This thesis explores the posthuman and post-anthropocentric notion of the subject outlined in Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory, and looks at Nigerian visual artist and performance artist Otobong Nkanga’s video Remains of the Green Hill (2015) as an artistic expression of this relational, embedded and embodied vision of subjectivity. The thesis starts off by exploring the construction of a human/non-human divide as it has become entrenched in the Humanist tradition. Using Braidotti’s theory on subjectivity in the era of the Anthropocene, I elaborate on the complications and paradoxes of such a divide. The decline of the autonomous and transcendental subject of Man in this particular era offers opportunities to deconstruct the human/non-human divide and consolidate alternative, relational modes of subject formation. Nkanga’s video artwork, when addressed from a posthumanist perspective, offers such alternatives. I read her work as a visualization of a posthuman process of subject formation, in which human and nonhuman agents congregate. I locate this quality of the artwork particularly in its depiction of the intimate and co-constitutive relationship between body and place, through which it deconstructs humanism’s ontological split between the human self and the (previously) nonhuman other.