Social Life of Waste Art : Plastic Lamp
As part of the Social Life of Waste collective we were scheduled for a bus to Mozambique, the workshops hosted in Pretoria were successful, there was a writing workshop in Harare and then we were to curate and host an exhibition in one of the most historic monuments of the city of Maputo ; the Fortress of Maputo or otherwise known as the Fortaleza, a historic site of an early-18th-century fort, now a museum with a cavalry officer's statue.
Here the collection of waste art from all over three cities in Southern Africa were hung, fixed, mounted and placed to be seen by ambassadors, artists and the public in a view at shifting perceptions of the value of waste.
My contribution was small lamp I had made from a broken tripod, a found object with a mysterious truncated cone for a shape and fibres that were clearly not legal to be used in manufacturing anymore and were now lost to the store rooms like one could find on large properties belonging to junk stores and finally a colourful veil of plastic found on the streets of Marabastad used for packaging and transporting and blowing around in abundance around the city and its markets - this was the final touch that created a soft pink cloud of light and for a long time brought any space it entered such a warmness that it was almost impossible to detect an element of conventional attitude towards waste when this light shone.
