Recipient of the 2023 Innovator Award
Ogwado Joachim, who lives and works in Uganda’s capital city of Kampala, has built a vibrant and community-spirited body of work in public spaces, using single-use plastics as his material of choice. His work is striking for the immediacy of its underlying metaphors and its ability to capture the collision of cultures through synthetic forms. Single-use plastics, particularly water bottles, are everywhere in this region of Sub-Saharan Africa; over 600 tons of plastic are disposed of every day in Uganda. Because there are no formal management systems to process this waste, the majority of it ends up being burned, buried, or dumped, collecting in wetlands, watercourses, and on the roadside.1 Less than 10 percent is recycled.2 Joachim says that it takes a while for people to understand the impact of the material and how they use it: “People just consume. They are given plastics as part of the food system, and most don’t even think about it…it just becomes a habit. People think that when you go to a shop, you’re supposed to get something that is already packed by the company that distributes it.”
Joachim decided to work with plastics not only for their availability, but also for their inherent qualities, including the distinctive blue color of PET plastics. He became interested in unconventional ways to manipulate this (over) abundant material and found that the more he worked with it, the more local perceptions started to change. He says that it is humbling to see people become interested in the work after they touch the materials and begin to see them in a different way.
Mirror (who we are) (2022) demonstrates the deliberateness of Joachim’s message—to see yourself in the materials. He says, “You have to face this head on. The work tries to reflect how people behave. I find that I have to go past my fears and try to address them.” His work shows a deep consideration of different ways to engage an audience, from standalone objects and performances to architectural interventions. Projects like Mirror find him on the streets with plastic material in hand, looking for ways to create dialogue by inviting people into the work. Then, just like that, the conversation starts: “Being in the streets, you’ve got people walking with their groceries, riding by on motorcycles, and traveling to and from work. They are seeing themselves in the sculptures and within the performances I do.”
Joachim believes that this is the right moment for people to see the potential of reusable materials. His objects perform for the public within the space of the people, well beyond a “normal” art context. He says that receiving the ISC Innovator Award gives him hope that his work, seen through new eyes, will draw more attention to the plastics situation within Uganda. He has noticed that growing numbers of young people around the city have found profitable work collecting discarded plastics and taking them to recycling companies and organizations; they often clean up areas outside the reach of the city authority: “Kids walk very long distances around the city looking for this material. When you’re going to town…you see them with very large sacks filled with plastic. This really caught my attention. These young people are looking for this material, and they can take it somewhere and get something out of it.”
Joachim sources his materials by going to dump sites to collect and cut plastic and by asking his neighbors to bring their discards to his studio (which he prefers). Cleaning the materials from the dumps can be a laborious task in itself, but his process is always labor intensive and much like a puzzle as he deconstructs the original objects and then trusts his instincts to reassemble them into new, reflexive forms.
When Joachim began working with plastics, he started reflecting on his process, thinking back to his childhood and how he used to express himself through play. Okuvuga Ekipira (2023) references a game played by rolling a tire, an act that also serves as a metaphor for plastics collecting and reuse. Joachim says that when he was growing up, “Children made their own playing materials. We’d manipulate different materials and create very interesting things that would later be used to play. But this culture is disappearing. When [I was young], you were supposed to be able to think of what you could use…our elders would teach us to observe first, create with what you have at hand, and make something for yourself that is useful. So, within this work specifically, I was trying to play with those ideas and how we used to [use] different things that were around us to imagine a world that we could thrive in as children.”
For Joachim, plastics offer a way to explore the past, present, and future. In Luo (2022), he addresses the search for identity, looking for a shared past, a history to associate oneself with in order to understand one’s lineage. Contemporary Uganda has a diversity of cultures, and as Joachim explains, his attempts to research his personal ancestry yielded “only scant traces.” The work considers what it means to put on a modern face, repurposing synthetic petroleum products to shield, or accentuate, an identity, or possibly to build up a new one. In cultural terms, plastic has been replacing the natural materials such as shell, gourd, wood, and clay that traditionally served as vessels, so it reflects a “fading cultural heritage,” but, through Joachim’s work, it also represents a sense of contemporary identity, unity, and purpose. The title references the Luo people who migrated from Bahr el Ghazal (currently South Sudan), following the Nile, and settled in different countries, including Uganda. For Joachim, the Luo masks serve as a metaphor for welcoming his roots: “I was using the mask[s] as a message of what’s going on here…there are different things happening in them, like around the eyes, which are blindfolded to symbolize the limited knowledge I possess about my heritage…During a dance that we perform in our culture, usually the men will have some feathers around their heads. I was trying to understand where I come from, who my people are. Where did we come from? I think people will use [the] masks to see themselves or to see their culture, but then to use the material in this way, it’s almost like I am putting in the face the problems that exist, but still making a very beautiful or complicated object out of the material.”
In the durational performance Untitled (2022), Joachim headed out into his neighborhood wearing a pseudo-high-tech, mask-like headpiece while carrying a blue plastic sphere. One part of the headpiece covered his ear, while the other, which resembled eyes or camera lenses, hung from his face, observing or surveilling the community. This interactive, participatory project makes the point that innovation does not always have to involve technical advances—it can arise from simply looking anew at what’s around you.
The castoffs of consumer culture, often disposed of in countries unable to handle massive amounts of refuse, amount to involuntary participation in a lopsided post-colonial capitalism, with little benefit to counterbalance the harm. Joachim’s work provides collective psychic armor, a kind of protection from environmental and social urgencies. His material transformations reclaim agency and assert independence while demonstrating the power of self-organization as a way to overcome and reclaim social space. Through support, growth, and collaboration, Joachim presents a synthetic form of us, an empowering mirror to the contemporary human spirit.
NOTES
1 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-ways-plastic-waste-ruining-uganda-eco-brixs-f6y1e#:~:text=Over%20600%20tonnes%20of%20plastic,working%20hard%20to%20change%20this
2 Additional information related to plastics disposal and recycling can be found at https://waterjournalistsafrica.com/2022/04/from-source-to-water-bodies-and-dining-table-tracking-the-journey-of-plastics-in-uganda.
