Perched on a hilltop and surrounded by a lush 22-hectare (54-acre) farm, the G.A.S. Farm House outside the village of Ikiṣẹ in southern Nigeria is not your average place for an artist residency. For Kosisochukwu Nnebe, who works at the intersection of food and art, it’s the ultimate retreat.
The 31-year-old Nigerian-Canadian is one of the first artists to be hosted at the Guest Artists Space Foundation’s barn house near the town of Ijebu Ode in Ogun state. Although she is a late riser, each morning before she has a chance to prepare eggs on agege bread, Nnebe is out of the door, heading to a banana grove five minutes’ walk away to cut banana leaves for use in a process called chlorophyll printing.
The technique involves developing images through the action of photosynthesis. Nnebe’s particular interest is using the process to print archival images on banana leaves.
“Since 2020, I’ve been exploring the use of foodways – the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region or historical period,” Nnebe says. She prints photographs of people and texts as “counter-archives” to challenge official records, and as a way to “open up subaltern perspectives”.
The farmhouse is one of two residences in Nigeria founded by the celebrated British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. The other is in Lagos, three hours’ drive from Ikiṣẹ.
When Shonibare started the farm in 2018, one of the first things he had to do was build a 3km access road. A portion of the land is a working farm, where 11 staff cultivate crops including tomatoes, habaneros, bell peppers maize and yams as part of the regenerative practices, with the produce sold at the farm gate and in the local village.
The G.A.S. Foundation was opened the following year, followed by the farmhouse residency building, which is solar-powered. Its tall windows and perforated external walls let in natural light, as part of the design by Lagos-based architects MOE+AA, led by Papa Omotayo.
Inside the house there is a shared common area with a living room and kitchen, a studio with large desks and easels, and two bedrooms for visiting artists plus a third room reserved for Shonibare.
“Besides the whistling of the wind, the intermittent pattering of rain against the roof, the distant sound of machetes cutting through dense plant life on the farm, there is an underlying stillness and quiet that is a welcome and sharp contrast from the chaos of Lagos,” Nnebe says.
Nnebe has been printing archival images on the banana leaves she harvests as a way to tell the complex stories behind the plant and its history. The banana industry, she says, has “historically had one of the most controversial production and supply systems – replete with egregious labour practices, the domination of single variants and the associated extensive use of pesticides that arises as a result”.
In addition to the small banana grove, the farm features fields full of cassava, another crop that Nnebe became fascinated with after she spent time in Jamaica last year and discovered that enslaved Africans in the 18th century used the plant to make a poison to give to their masters.
Among the jobs she did before becoming a full-time artist in 2023, Nnebe worked as part of a team within the Canadian government that led to the development of the country’s first national food policy.
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British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, who set up two artists’ residencies in Nigeria. Photograph: Ademola Odusami for Laah
She says: “It was [through] this experience … [that] I came to understand food as inherently political – something I now try to communicate through my art practice.”
G.A.S. and its UK-based sister organisation, Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), came out of a project space that Shonibare started in 2008 in the ground floor of his studio in Hackney, London.
“The farm is in part about addressing food security,” says Belinda Holden, the chief executive officer at Y.S.F. “It really comes out of Yinka’s practice as an artist. At heart, he’s a political artist, dealing with issues including migration, identity, climate and post-colonial reimaginings.”
The G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, which started in 2022, hosts three artists at a time and has hosted more than 60 to date. “A central ethos of the foundations is for the three artists to comingle and interact with one another in a way that enriches their experience during the residency,” according to Moni Aisida, the executive director at G.A.S.
The first artist in residence this year at the Ikiṣẹ farmhouse was Misheck Masamvu, from Zimbabwe, who stayed for almost six weeks, from August to early October.
“The residency provided fragmented pockets of time, a stark contrast to the hustle and bustle between Lagos and Ikiṣẹ,” says Masamvu, who has a farm in Zimbabwe and works as an abstract painter. “It created the perfect opportunity to slow down, break down boundaries and immerse myself fully into the environment.”
The work he completed included a double-sided canvas, stretched across makeshift frames, inspired by “the subtle shifts of the environment: the birds that nested near the cornfields, the vivid colours of pawpaw leaves, and the ants crossing my path to the studio”.
Meanwhile, Nnebe, whose residency ends in early December, says the caretaker of the farm has asked her to make portraits of her family.
“There is an excitement at the thought of seeing oneself imprinted on plant life in such a way – and the question then turns to: how do we preserve it? I think this is a very human impulse that speaks to our desire to see ourselves reflected in our environment, but also to leave a trace.”
