In her work, Otobong Nkanga (born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974) explores the relationships that humanity forms with other species and with the natural environment. This tapestry depicts scattered limbs that evoke the lives lost whilst attempting to cross seas and oceans, both in the present and in the past.

The artist highlights the imbalance between humans and the natural environment, as well as the inequality between societies that benefit from the current economic system and those that suffer its most severe consequences. The seabed depicts the different stages of the life cycle: germination, death and rebirth. The forms, which evoke plants, corals and human body parts, refer both to the natural process by which all dead matter is transformed back into life and to the impact that humanity has on ecosystems such as the oceans through the exploitation of their resources.