In Harare's Mbare district, one of Zimbabwe's major recycling hubs and a dense node of the city's informal economy, artist Moffat Takadiwa sorts through the hard residue of global consumption and builds it into something that stops people in their tracks. Computer keyboard keys, toothbrush heads, bottle caps, nail polish parts, buttons, and combs are gathered from dumping sites around the capital and from a nearby clothing factory, then sorted, drilled, threaded, and assembled into large wall works that hover somewhere between textile, sculpture, and historical record. From a distance, they read as ceremonial skins, shields, or oversized pieces of jewellery. Up close, they dissolve into thousands of small plastic fragments, each one carrying traces of use, trade, waste, and touch. What Takadiwa has built across more than a decade of practice is one of the most considered and quietly urgent bodies of work in contemporary African art, a practice rooted in place, driven by material, and entirely serious about what it means to repair something that was deliberately broken.
How Moffat Takadiwa's practice is rooted in Harare's landscape of imported waste
