-Lisa C Soto
Curated by Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah
15 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
This Neoteric Walk-In series brought us into an enclave of quiet intensity—The Courtyard at the residence of photographer and cultural figure Francis Nii Obodai Provençal. Within this lush, sun-dappled space, framed by creeping foliage and Accra’s piercing daylight, Lisa C Soto’s exhibition Tectonic Transference unfolded like a slow-breathing organism.
Curated by Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah, the exhibition positions Soto’s practice at the intersection of ecology, and the unseen forces binding human and non-human worlds. Set against the textured walls and sculptural greenery of Nii Obodai’s courtyard home, the works felt less installed than rooted—as though they had emerged organically from the environment. This sensibility was further reinforced by the use of woven mats, proposed and meticulously researched by Ankrah, who explored different materials and production methods with multiple makers. Sourced from Tamale and incorporated into the installation, the mats grounded the photo transfers within a forest-like atmosphere, extending the exhibition’s ecological logic into its very structure.
The Courtyard is an extension of Obodai’s lifelong devotion to seeing and sensing the world with care. Known for an expansive photographic practice that moves between Accra, Maputo, and beyond, Nii Obodai has built his life around documenting the unseen rituals, landscapes, and oral histories of African environments. His home, now a growing hub for artists, thinkers, and itinerant creatives, embodies the ethos of Nuku Café and Nuku Studio—spaces he founded to nurture socially engaged artistic communities in Ghana.
The images from our visit reveal this atmosphere clearly: clusters of art pieces, works laid out on a table like open books, and Lisa Soto animatedly guiding us through her process. Nothing about the space feels hurried; instead, it listens.
During the walkthrough, Soto generously unpacked the evolution of her practice—its migrations across continents, mediums, and conceptual anchors. Born to Puerto Rican and Jamaican parents, raised between Spain and New York, and now based in Los Angeles with extended periods in Puerto Rico and Ghana, Soto’s life is a map of crossings.
It is no surprise, then, that she describes cartography as the foundation of her work.
But “mapping” here is not geographic. It is energetic, vibrational, relational.
“All my work refers to cartography. Because I’m from different islands and countries, my thinking is always spatial. But it’s also about energies—force fields—materials with their own histories.”-Lisa C Soto
Originally a painter, she shifted into three-dimensional languages after long experiments with industrial materials: mylar, wire, fishing line, cement. Mylar—in particular—became a pivotal medium. A translucent polyester film once used by architects, it allowed Soto to layer images into floating, shifting membranes.
Yet, after a decade of using industrial materials, she began to feel the need for a return—a “full circle.”
The shift began when she moved to Puerto Rico and encountered the intimate, informing intelligence of mycelium. Her explanation—captured in her own words:
- Mycelium as the earth’s digestive system
- Mycelium as collaborator with 90% of terrestrial plants
- Mycelium as a silent architect of ecological balance
- Mycelium as community, reciprocity, and survival
– Lisa C Soto
Her fascination is not metaphorical; it is relational. From her descriptions, one senses that her material practice has become a dialogue with living systems, not merely a representation of them.
Her paper-based works emerged in this transition, supported by a serendipitous gift: handmade Ghanaian paper produced from mulberry plants originally introduced during the Nkrumah era for the development of local publishing industries. The plants, now naturalized but “invasive,” produce a fine, luminous paper that captivated Soto with its tactile intelligence. Handmade in Ghana by students and gifted to Soto by master papermaker Mary Hark, the mulberry plant, produces a remarkably supple and luminous paper.
This material history becomes part of the work’s conceptual charge: a plant brought for progress, forgotten in practice, and reactivated through care and knowledge-sharing. The paper embodies transference across time, ecology, and labor—mirroring the larger narratives Soto traces throughout the exhibition.
“This paper was made in Ghana, from plants grown in Ghana, but not originally from here. I found that fascinating—the tension, the migration, the imposition.” -Lisa C Soto
Thus her works became sites of encounter—between industrial and botanical, local and diasporic, ancestral and contemporary.
At the core of the exhibition are photo transfers, a technique Soto began exploring after observing students at KNUST experiment with image transference. Drawn to the process for its ability to distort, invert, and destabilize photographic certainty, she describes these works as portals—images that hover between worlds.
“It’s a photo, but it’s not,” she said. “It becomes another way of seeing.”
The transferred images originate from two Atlantic sites:
- land Soto owns in the Western Region of Ghana, along the Atlantic coast
- the town of Loíza, Puerto Rico, founded by direct descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped Spanish colonization and established their own autonomous community
These layered images form visual palimpsests that speak to forced migrations, imposed histories, and cultural survivals. Some compositions reveal sharp interruptions; others dissolve into blended terrains. The blend, Soto explains, is not confusion but identity—Caribbean, African, European, and Indigenous lineages converging into something unresolved yet whole.
The exhibition title, Tectonic Transference, resonates here: histories collide like tectonic plates, fracturing and reforming landscapes across time.
The installations compelled visitors to huddle around these works, leaning in closely, almost breathing with them. That intimacy is essential. These are not distant wall-hung works; they require proximity, handling, attention.
Curator Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah orchestrates the exhibition with the quiet assurance of someone who understands the power of restraint. Rather than crowding the courtyard with objects, he arranges the works to complement the porousness of the space.
The wind lifts edges of paper. Shadows of leaves fall across textured surfaces. Visitors move freely between artworks and plants. Ankrah’s curatorial direction allows transference—the exhibition’s core theme—to occur between environment, artwork, and visitor.
At the heart of the exhibition is a simmering pot containing a bird’s nest collected from Soto’s land in Ghana, boiled gently to release a subtle, earthy aroma. This olfactory gesture offers another way of “seeing” the land—through smell, memory, and bodily recognition.
Accompanying this is a distorted soundscape, recorded over a full day and night on the same land in Ghana. The sounds—altered, stretched, unsettled—gesture toward tectonic movement: landscapes colliding, histories forced upon one another. From this disturbance, however, a new environment emerges—sonic, visual, and analog—formed from rupture yet alive with possibility.
At moments, the conversation turned humorous—mycelium mistaken for vegetarianism, questions looping back into botanical revelations. At others, it became deeply reflective, touching on ancestry, ecological collapse, and artistic responsibility. Soto answered with a mix of scholarly precision, anecdotal honesty, and contagious excitement.
This, ultimately, is the heart of Tectonic Transference:
to sense how materials carry worlds; how landscapes speak across oceans; how artistic practices become bridges between histories and ecosystems.
Tectonic Transference is not merely on view at Nii Obodai’s Courtyard—
it lives there.
Coverage by Kezia Ouomoye 1/13/2026
(c) 2026