CARVED TO FLOW
The word “support” has many meanings. “To support” can be to hold up, carry, brace, reinforce or underpin. It can also be to provide for someone or something – to take care of and look after. Furthermore, it can be to give moral support, to be a source of strength and comfort, to encourage, buoy up, hearten and soothe. In speech and thought, it can be to substantiate, to attest, verify and authenticate.
As a thing of physical limits, a support can be a pillar or a beam, which through compression transmits the weight of the above to other structural elements below; it can be the place where the overlooking and the looking up meet. Whether small and wooden like a beam, or glassy metal like a post, or duteous marble like a caryatid, the purpose of a structural support is to be strong and unwavering; except of course for when the underpinning’s hidden, then beams and pillars can also be decorative – unconcerned with muscle but robust-looking to the eyes. As pillars compress to transmit weight, or sit still to look as if they are, they are not unlike tissues of plants that are joined together by aspiring horticulturalists to bolster up shared growth. The scion (the upper part of the combined plant) and the rootstock (the lower part) which keep the appearance of separate parts, come together to merge into one another – to permanently intertwine in this new life that is being grafted at the point where the overlooking and the looking up meet, like carrying on the head – human-powered transport – where burdens balance above sight but weigh heavily on the nervous system.
Supports -the actions, the objects, the metaphors- they move in circles, concentrically expanding and coiling into and onto each other. One support supports another, one grafts into another, one is grafted from another and into another yet, inspiring ontologies of curves and arches – economies in which material flows out and back. Biological nutrients circulate and re-enter the biosphere. Technical nutrients circulate and re-enter the production system. They regenerate and restore, again and again, forming circular economies. And then, there’s that which unnamed, they generate silently for future generations to anatomize and look at.
Carved to Flow is one such circle arching out and back from Athens to Kassel to somewhere else. In Athens it is a laboratory where oils, butters and lye from all around the Mediterranean, Middle East, North and West Africa meet to create a soap. In Kassel it is storage and distribution, breathing stacked in towering blocks of saponaceous lattice, danced around through carrier hands to generate that which will circle back to somewhere else, to take new form – a no-waste product carved to flow.

MAYA TOUNTA

o 8
Of a circular economy is a specific salt of a fatty acid – “o 8” – a soap made of water, charcoal and lye, and other butters and oils from across the Mediterranean, Middle East, North and West Africa.
This is a soap being created at present but drawing on expert knowledge gar- nered liquidly at a time before Palmolive (palm oil and olive oil) brought liquid soap to the world and fat was forgotten. To talk of the simplicity of its chemistry would be to undermine the complexity of its alchemy as it forms within it a map of untraceable lu- brication channels: roads of edible substances, industries created around fuel and trans- portation, networks of sustenance and rejuvenation of the body; crates of place casting at once their many shadows. We break open the chords of soap with charcoal, like in those cosmogonies that begin with the darkness. Charcoal is what gives 0 8 its black colour. It forms the base to which the oils are committed, in evidence. It is carbon and ash obtained by removing water from other substances heated in the absence of oxygen. It is suffocated breath that has impressed likeness or abstraction on paper, in drawings and markings, both hasty and otherwise.
It is facilitator of barbequing Sundays, non-aspirational holidaying, and familial clichés. To do with charcoal (render), or to do over charcoal (cook), or even yet to undo with charcoal (treat drug overdose) – it wields both language and will. It remembers fire and industry, geographically omnipresent. Its discovery could have occurred many times over – “of independent invention” many would say. Now, non-autonomously, it gets moulded into briquets, bars, powder strips or names for a colour.
The runny light into soap is water. The binding and untethering substance that presents every other ingredient with mass, with which to act and be subject. Water: the resource treated by the economy as object to sovereign producers overlooking its cyclical nature and wellspring of circular economics. Rainfall shocks – land use – agricultural yields. Rainful shocks – impacts on human capital, on firm performance. Water scarcity – freshwater resilience. Water, of the womb. Water at the bar; at the restaurant. Water in our bodies; in the bodies of lovers; in the bodies of enemies; in the bodies of enemies of state and of state-heads. We think of “precious”, “inestimable” – of holly wells. “Make it rain” (money) we say. It’s pouring outside. o 8 is pouring.
The soap’s irrigation system broadcasts thoughts and fantasies buried under oil and butter amalgamations. 4 oils, 3 butters – they once formed the middle. Now they are diffused – sent out – felt throughout the bar. There’s encouragement to speak, say their names outloud – acknowledge in slow time what is being brought back into the skin and into the larger irrigation system of porcelain, plastic, metal, earth and salt. “Olive oil” – “Coconut Oil” – “Laurel Oil” – “Sage Oil” – “Shea Butter” – “Cocoa Butter” – “Babassu Butter”. There is no beginning, middle, or end. They were once pure. Now they’re social- ised. From what they remember of themselves, and of where they came from, they form a sense of self, or inter-self – of becoming in relation. You hear it in the hushed babble of o 8 repositories: the false silence of the bathroom, the storage unit, the pilestock in display, the cloaking paper or the hexagon mould that temporarily hosts them. “We are oils and butters.” “We are fundaments.”

MAYA TOUNTA

THE GERMINATION
For the third phase of the work titled the Germination, Nkanga has created The Carved to Flow Foundation that has its base in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. The Foundation is conceived to be a platform dedicated to researching material cultures and fostering shared experimentation and exchange locally. Operating with the proceeds from the sales of the O8 Black Stone soaps, under Nkanga’s direction, the Foundation, which will take shape in the coming year, will realise the work’s founding ambition to achieve self-sustenance; it will become, in other words, the organism that will have grown from the seeds of the work’s previous two phases. In parallel to its activities in Nigeria, the Foundation will contribute to foreign initiatives spearheaded by people in its network. An instance of this kind of support will be its contribution to the maintainance of a space in Athens, Greece where soapmaker Evi Lachana will set up a cosmetic lab, and curator Maya Tounta a non-profit art space.