While participants in the Afri Plastics Challenge address the problems of plastics in Sub-Saharan Africa through innovation a growing number of respected African artists are also raising awareness and promoting behavioural change regarding plastic waste.
Prompting viewers to think about things in new ways is one of the historic roles of art and artists have often addressed the “big issues” of the times in which they live. So, in an era of unprecedented environmental crisis in Africa, it is no surprise that the continent’s artists are increasingly turning their attention to environmental issues.
One of the notable features in the work of contemporary African artists using waste plastic as a material is a cultural perspective in which plastics do not have the same connotations or “meanings” as they do in numerous other regions of the world. In wealthy, technologically advanced countries, plastic has long been viewed as a cheap, disposable material, one of the very reasons for today’s pressing ecological problems. Plastic, though non-biodegradable, was discarded without thought for decades.
But in many African countries, particularly in poorer regions or places with a less developed infrastructure, what is considered throwaway elsewhere might be highly valued. A plastic bag or bottle readily relegated to the litter bin in affluent regions might be a useful and repeatedly re-used receptacle for carrying goods or water over great distances.
Plastic and Africa
In the work of numerous contemporary African artists, plastic is deployed as a “poor material” – in the tradition of Arte Povera – that is far more ambiguous. As with the influential Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, sometimes plastic, a “poor material”, has a political dimension, evoking the continent’s colonial history and repeated exploitation. Africa’s extremely rich materials – gold, diamonds, copper, manganese or precious woods – have repeatedly been exploited by arrivistes and colonisers while its peoples are “rewarded” with supposedly desirable First World technological advancements; plastic, for example.
Simultaneously, some artists look to the traditions of African cultures that rely on available resources, sometimes in unforgiving biomes or social conditions, with resilient ingenuity and pragmatism. Just as African people once looked to natural materials—clay, barks, grasses or even ostrich eggs—to create everything from clothing and shelter, to receptacles for carrying water across arid deserts, so too have modern Africans embraced the detritus of industrialisation as useful materials. Think of comfortable sandals made from worn-out tires sold in the markets in Zimbabwe or children playing with intricate toys created from discarded tin cans in Ghana: there is an argument to say that recycling was invented through necessity in Africa long before the rest of the world understood it as essential.
In African contemporary art, plastic evokes many things, from the continent’s history of finding something rich in a poor material, to political statements; from the aesthetic, to calls to action to reduce the damage to the continent and its surrounding seas and oceans. In the work of the four artists detailed below, you’ll find some or all of these themes.