CliP Open Session 4: Public Lecture with Kosisochukwu Nnebe - The Seeds We Carry

“The 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule." These words by Walter Benjamin reflect a reality for many Black women: crisis is not new, but a shapeshifting terrain navigated for centuries.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe's public lecture "The Seeds We Carry" turns to recipes as archives of covert and gendered crisis response among Black and Indigenous women. By tracing the concealed pathways of knowledge transmission embedded in the forced migration of bodies, goods, flora, and fauna, Nnebe reframes foodways as counter-archives of colonial histories—offering insight into navigating a world fundamentally shaped by extractive violence and the response to it.

About Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist and researcher working across installation, lens- and time-based media, textiles and sculpture. Through a research-based and pedagogical practice, she rethinks historical narratives by centring the agency and emotional worlds of Black women and offers transgressive representations and understandings of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.

Nnebe is a 2025 alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands and a 2023 Awardee of the G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare CBE RE. Her work has been exhibited internationally including: Framer Framed, Unfair Amsterdam, NADA New York, the Art Museum of Toronto, the Hanoi Photo Festival, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Bowling Green State University Gallery.

About CLiP #7: The Garage of Prepping Otherwise

CLiP (Collective Learning in Practice) is an educational program organized by Kunstinstituut Melly. For this edition, curated by the art-education collective The Garage School, young participants explore collective survival in times of global crisis. Over six months (October 2025–March 2026), participants develop skills and tools for collective survival through a mix of creative and practical methods, including discussion, movement, LARPing, food preservation, and mutual aid. They also produce monthly “letters to the future(s) we are preparing for” in any form: text, video, performance, or collage. Outcomes, such as exhibitions, radio shows, or public LARPs, are created collaboratively.