Home > Recycling in African Art
Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression
Friday, November 13th 9:00-5:00
Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Yavitz Fund. In addition, funding generously provided by the Center for African Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Sustainability.
Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/Center for African Studies, University of Florida
In many parts of Africa, recycling is both an expressive medium and a strategy for survival. Artists working in a wide range of markets, from the local to the international, transform objects and images into aesthetic expressions. This symposium will explore the aesthetics, economics, and paradoxes of recycling as an artistic practice in Africa. Presentations by art historians, anthropologists, artists, and curators will address the reuse and reanimation of objects in Africa and the African diaspora.
9:00 Welcome Leonardo A. Villalón, Director, Center for African Studies, University of Florida
9:15-10:30 Panel #1 Recycling and the Power of Objects
Paper #1 9:15-9:45 David Doris, University of Michigan
Useless Trash
Paper #2 9:50-10:20 Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles
“The After-Life of the Original” in Senegalese Sufi Practices
Discussant: Fiona McLaughlin, Dept. of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Florida
10:45-12:00 Panel #2 Economies of Recycling
Paper #1 10:45-11:15 Suzanne Gott, University of British Colombia
Ghana’s Recycled Glass Bead-making Arts
Paper #2 11:20-11:50 Vanessa Linganzi, Northwestern University
Global scrap for local production: Producing utilitarian goods for the Burkinabè
Discussant: Anna Prizzia, Director, Office of Sustainability, University of Florida
12:00-2:00 lunch
2:00-3:15 Panel #3 Recycling as Medium: Images and Objects
Paper #1 2:00-2:30 Sonya Clark, Virginia Commonwealth University
Sankofa: Making from a Material Culture Perspective
Paper #2 2:35-3:05 Fatimah Tuggar, independent artist
Recycling: Collage, Montage & Assemblage
Discussant: Maria Rogal, School of Art and Art History (Design), University of Florida
3:30-4:45 Panel #4 Recycling as History
Paper #1 4:05-4:35 Sarah Fee, Royal Ontario Museum
Ravelings: The many realms of recycling in the fiber arts of Madagascar
Paper #2 3:30-4:00 Victoria L. Rovine, University of Florida
Recycled, Revealed: South African Fashion Design
Discussant: Robin Poynor, School of Art and Art History, University of Florida
Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression
Friday, November 13th 9:00-5:00
Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Yavitz Fund. In addition, funding generously provided by the Center for African Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Sustainability.
Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/Center for African Studies, University of Florida
--Sonya Clark is the Chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She is a widely exhibited artist whose sculpture explores issues of heritage and identity, often drawing on African and African-American forms as sources of inspiration. Her most recent work repurposes combs—an object that contains layers of meanings and associations—into sculptures that are both elegant forms and subtle references to the identities that hair represents.
-- David T. Doris (Ph.D Yale 2002) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, in the Department of the History of Art and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Getty Research Institute. His book, Vigilant Things: The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.
--Sarah Fee is the Associate Curator for the Eastern Hemisphere Collections at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She received her PhD in African Studies from the Institut des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (Paris) and has been conducting research on textiles in Madagascar since 1988. She co-founded the Tandroy Ethnographic Museum and has published extensively on textiles and Malagasy culture.
--Suzanne Gott (Art History Ph.D., 2002; Folklore Ph.D., 1994: Indiana University Bloomington) is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her publications, focusing on women’s visual culture in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, address issues of gender and performance in women’s dress and in Asante funerary arts. She is guest curator of The Newark Museum exhibition, Glass Beads of Ghana (January 2008-March 2010).
--Vanessa Linganzi recently received her doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University. Her ethnography of urban metal recyclers in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, focused on the re-use of industrial scrap materials.
--Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts is an art historian (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1991) who studies the philosophical underpinnings of particular African visual and performance-based arts. She is Professor of Culture and Performance in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. From 1999 – 2008, she was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Fowler Museum Her exhibitions and publications produced at the Fowler Museum include A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003), with Allen F. Roberts, which won both the Herskovits Award and the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award.
--Victoria L. Rovine (Ph.D. Indiana University 1998) is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Art History and the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. Her research is focused on African textiles, fashion, and contemporary art. Her book, Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali, was published by Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001 and republished in an updated edition by Indiana University Press (2008). She has published numerous book chapters and articles on her current research, which explores African fashion designers in local and global markets and the influence of African forms on Western fashion design.
--Fatimah Tuggar Fatimah is a multidisciplinary artist who uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She combines objects, images and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies, and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities. Her work has been widely exhibited at international venues, in over 20 countries on five continents, including the Bamako Biennale, Mali, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Tuggar is in her second year at Duke University; last year as a research fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and this year as a Visiting Artist in Art, Art History & Visual Studies and the Department of African & African American Studies.
Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression
Friday, November 13th 9:00-5:00
Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Yavitz Fund. In addition, funding generously provided by the Center for African Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Sustainability.
Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/Center for African Studies, University of Florida
Sonya Clark
Sankofa: Making from a Material Culture Perspective
In this presentation I will share how the roots of common objects are recycled and renewed in my work. I start with a question about the function of an object of material culture. Each artwork is an approach to an answer. Answers beget more questions. So the dialogue begins: a call and response, a recycling that renews the object in the present while honoring its roots, our roots. Held within each object of my inspiration whether a piece of cloth, a comb, a bead, a hairstyle, or an amulet is meaning, materiality, and legacy. The echoes of history and whispers of future are my source material. I count on object to be my griots, to mirror and communicate our collective and cultural identity.
David T. Doris
Useless trash.
In discourse regarding the materiality of (global) domination and (local) resistance, stories of the strategic recycling of discarded industrial objects into hand-tooled treasures have come to constitute veritable postmodern allegories of oppression, struggle, and redemption. Metaphors emerge as relations of power are overturned in miniature. Out of history’s trash-bin arises fresh glamour. Such discourse is understandably dominant—in these objects we experience human conflict; in them we see hope.
Some waste-object assemblages do not fit this discourse. The ones in question are called ààlè, often made of discarded or broken materials: worn-out shoes, stubs of brooms, corncobs, snail shells, and other ordinary detritus. In southwestern Nigeria, ààlè protect properties from thieves; they are visual warnings, coded threats of punishment, indexical emblems of power. Degraded materials comprise abstract portraits of “the thief” as a useless non-person. For comparison: Dada, in which assemblages of trash were meant to indict viewers’ aestheticizing (thus antisocial) gaze.
Sarah Fee
Ravelings: The many realms of recycling in the fiber arts of Madagascar
This paper explores the notion that the reuse of objects may be a “distinctly African artistic practice.” Following Crantz’ (1995) council that “recylia” be carefully considered within all its contexts, and in relation to the analyst’s own categories, it finds a wide range of motives for, and interpretations of, the artistic appropriation of discarded goods within a single country—and within a single artist. Three examples of weaving art from three different points in Madagascar history are examined. The first involves the unraveling and re-use of imported silk in the creation of luxurious fancy cloths from the 18th century. The second entails the reweaving of discarded fabrics into a sturdy but lowly cloth known as fahamboron-damba in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Finally is the work of contemporary textile artist Zo Razakaratrimo who actively incorporates a variety of discarded objects – including the detritus of Malagasy industrial production, each piece varying in commentary on these goods. Geographically part of Africa, Madagascar also has strong cultural and economic connections to Asia, allowing for a discussion of comparative material on recycling from that continent.
Suzanne Gott
Ghana’s Recycled Glass Bead-making Arts
Recycling processes have been used in crafting Ghana’s most prestigious art forms. In the past, imported silks were unraveled for colorful threads to re-weave into regal strip-woven kente, while certain ceremonial and ritual displays of wealth called for re-casting gold regalia into novel new forms. This presentation addresses the historical development and contemporary innovations of Ghana’s most enduring recycling art, the crafting of beads from recycled glass. Building upon recycled bead-making techniques introduced through trans-Saharan trade, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ghanaian artists developed their own powder-glass bead-making processes to create local versions of European trade beads. In late twentieth and early twenty-first century Ghana, bead artists have developed new transparent and painted recycled glass bead-making techniques to cultivate new local and global markets, as well as respond to the loss of heirloom trade beads to the international African trade bead market as a result of Ghana’s recent decades of economic decline.
Vanessa Linganzi
Global scrap for local production: Producing utilitarian goods for the Burkinabè market
In Burkina Faso, West Africa, aluminum-smelting, tinsmithing, and tire-working are three modern trades that have developed with the rising import of scrap supplies and consumer goods from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Operating outside the circuits of development aid, NGOs, and microfinance programs, these producers have maintained their activities for over three decades despite the structural limitations of their economy, seizing every new commercial opportunity that the booming capital city offers. Their production supplies the entire domestic market with utilitarian goods such as cooking ware, rubber shoes, and buckets, and spare parts for bicycles, mopeds, or cars.
In this paper, I will examine how these producers have adapted their production to the needs and purchasing power of the population. The increasing import of cheap Asian consumer goods feeds their creativity with new designs and new products to market. For these producers, technical and artistic creativity is a vital marketing tool.
Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts
“The After-Life of the Original” in Senegalese Sufi Practices
In contemporary urban Senegal, recycling is not only a practical necessity, but also reflects a Sufi logic of spiritual transformation. The creative impulse to generate new purpose and meaning from discarded materials through the “renewed life of the original” (Benjamin 1968) derives inspiration from the teachings of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), founder of the Mouride Sufi Way and proponent of a powerful work ethic that privileges resourcefulness and ingenuity in the face of colonial and post-colonial Africa’s greatest challenges. This paper explores Amadou Bamba as a “Saint of Recycling” (A. F. Roberts 1996) to understand how the precepts of Mouridiyya encourage the innovative spirit of recycling, how Bamba’s image is itself an example of recuperation as resistance, how devotees recycle the Saint’s life through hagiographic narratives to mirror their own, and finally how several contemporary artists produce art that embodies such Mouride principles for consumption by a global international art market.
Victoria L. Rovine
Recycled, Revealed: South African Fashion Design
South Africa’s contemporary fashion market is exceptionally vibrant, and it plays a prominent role in the country’s much-heralded post-Apartheid reshaping of national identity. Recycling, whether literal or conceptual, is a recurring trope in the work of many fashion designers. Some re-use old clothing to create new, others revive carefully selected garment or textile styles in contemporary design, and still other reach into the country’s past to recycle images or stories as fodder for new work. While the cyclical nature of fashion has long been the subject of commentary (as in Walter Benjamin’s characterization of fashion as a “tiger’s leap” into the past), I will argue that in South Africa, this recycling of the past has particular significance that sheds light on the ways in which an often painful past is being reconciled with aspirations for the future.
Fatimah Tuggar
Recycling: Collage, Montage & Assemblage
My art practice and recycling have a common bound of reusing existing materials and commodities. However, while recycling intends to decrease consumption of raw materials, reduce environmental pollution and control energy use, I primarily intend to use cultural products to comment on culture. Often the material in use is both subject and object being use with a shift in meaning. The context of my reuse is framed by both western art practice of “found art object” and a long history of West African tradition of bricolage and fair use of materials and knowledge. In a visual essay I will discuss this relationship of recycling to my practice.
Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression
Friday, November 13th 9:00-5:00
Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Yavitz Fund. In addition, funding generously provided by the Center for African Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Sustainability.
Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/Center for African Studies, University of Florida
In many parts of Africa, recycling is both an expressive medium and a strategy for survival. Artists working in a wide range of markets, from the local to the international, transform objects and images into aesthetic expressions. This symposium will explore the aesthetics, economics, and paradoxes of recycling as an artistic practice in Africa.
Professional artists across the continent transform discarded materials into objects for display in museums and galleries. Some recycle virtually rather than literally, cutting, pasting, and recreating images and objects from one context into another to create new forms that incorporate fragments of past histories. Recycling occurs in every medium, from sculpture and painting to video and fashion. For some artists, the materials are primarily an aesthetic choice, while for others salvaged materials are a practical solution to their lack of access to more conventional media.
Alongside the repurposing of objects and images in studio art contexts, recycling is also a practical necessity for many Africans. In North America and Europe, the reuse of discarded materials is largely a choice, associated with chic, “green” trendiness. In many African contexts, extending the lives of objects beyond their intended uses isn’t a good deed or a lifestyle choice. It is simply essential, a way of life. Empty cans are transformed into lamps, worn tires and inner tubes become sandals or water buckets, and torn clothing is used to create new garments. Some of these practical solutions to the lack of resources have come to be marketed as art, including children’s toys made of recycled cans, baskets made of telephone wire, and plastic bags transformed into rugs and other products. Artists’ cooperatives, some organized by development organizations, have transformed these and other recycled goods into international commodities.
This symposium will explore the implications of Africa’s diverse recycling markets. Issues to be addressed include:
--How important are the past meanings of recycled objects and images when they are repurposed? Are their histories incorporated into the new art forms?
--Is there tension between recycling as necessity and as artistic choice?
--Does the ironic reuse of objects by Western artists, exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, provide a useful lens for analysis of contemporary African art?