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In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, artists’ creations protest the country’s plight as a dump for global waste.

Tire Man, by Savant Noir, is one of the sculpture–performance art creations that protest centuries of drain on the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the taking of rubber to manufacture tires. Photographs By Stéphan Gladieu

— By AyodeJi Rotinwa | May 10, 2022

It started as a countercultural art movement in 2001.

After years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kinshasa—following teachers’ advice on creating work with “proper” materials, such as resin and plaster of paris—some students in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) decided to do something different. They created art with what was in their immediate environment, including tires, exhaust pipes, foam, plastic bottles, antennas, tins that had held milk or paint, feathers, CDs, rubber slippers, and other discarded items.

This work, the artists believed, felt familiar to a Congolese audience and spoke to a particularly egregious aspect of Congolese life: waste.

Left: Patrick Kitete’s Flip-Flop Man features the rubber that goes into making inexpensive shoes. Stéphan Gladieu photographed these creations for projects that he names in scientific classification form, as if the costumed figures were new species: Homo trash trash and Homo detritus.

Bottom: Mvunzi Muteba, Jr., said he designed his character, Tin Can, to raise Africans’ awareness of how multinationals’ presence has affected Africa. Despite the continent’s riches, he says, “Africans still remain poor. They expect help from foreigners,” but he insists that multinationals, in fact, come to Africa “to steal, create conflicts, [and] finance armed groups.”

Right: For several years, Gladieu has photographed Kinshasan artists wearing attire they create from rubbish—here, Shaka Fumu Kabaka dresses as Razor Man. At first reluctant to take the photo, Gladieu says he couldn’t “deny the reality” of the artist’s chosen medium: The suit is made of razor blades, which youth gang members use to ritually cut their initiates.

Waste generated locally by citizens. Waste foisted on the country by hyper-consumerist nations. Waste triggered by the endless extraction of resources from the DRC’s earth, or the rapacious collection of the same above land.

In Kinshasa, gutters are brimming with nonrecyclable plastic bottles. Markets are awash with second- and thirdhand goods, castoffs from high-income countries and, at a quickening pace, China. In areas where international companies mine for cobalt—a precious component of smartphone batteries—frequent discharges contaminate river systems and surrounding life.

By repurposing waste to create sculpture and performance art, the artists wanted to dial up the public’s acuity toward an ongoing emergency. In 2015 they laid the groundwork for a collective to institutionalize the art: Ndaku Ya Life Is Beautiful, led by Eddy Ekete. A Kinshasa-born artist and social activist, Ekete also founded the KinAct festival, an annual showcase for the provocative creations. Increasingly, for the artists, the waste provides an opening to comment on fraught sociopolitical issues.

From Left: Artists ascribe meaning to their materials. Savant Noir puts feathers, which invoke ancestors’ aid, on a Western-style suit mocking rampant consumerism. Second from left : Arnold Etabe uses plastic rings to represent viruses. Third from Left: Kilomboshi Pape Noir turned cigarette waste into the figure of Butt Man, Gladieu says, as a reminder “that although the butt is very small, it is still very polluting”—full of toxins, such as lead, formaldehyde, and arsenic, and slow to decompose. Right: Making a figure out of automobile parts was Precy Numbi’s way of protesting the millions of “garbage cars” imported into Africa every year—secondhand vehicles that discourage the growth of the continent’s own auto industry.

Robot Annonce, a wearable sculpture by Jared Kalenga, is made of broken radio parts. It seeks to raise awareness about the ever spreading reach of fake news.

Femme Électrique, Falonne Mambu’s creation made of electric wires, is double-edged. It speaks to the paucity of electric power service in the DRC and, simultaneously, what goes on in the dark: sexual assaults, kidnappings. Mambu’s inspiration for the work was drawn from periods in her life when she was homeless.

These socially conscious creators who turn refuse into protest art “are out here pushing limits,” says Yvon Edoumou, founder of Kinshasa’s Galerie Malabo. “We don’t see a lot of that.”

Left: Falonne Mambu created Femme Électrique out of a tangle of electric wires. It not only critiques the paucity of electric power service in the DRC but also illuminates dangers found in the dark: sexual assaults and kidnappings. The work was inspired by periods of homelessness in Mambu’s life. Right: Bayoka’s Cork Warrior Man features bottle-cap armor symbolizing resistance to colonialism.

Sarah Ndele made herself a suit from a gaudy variety of plastic containers and gave the character two names: Plastic Woman and Kiadi Kibeni (How Sad).

Left: Kilomboshi Pape Noir dresses as Rubber Man to pose in a Kinshasa industrial district where pollution fouls the water, soil, and air. Middle: Anita Mobando, who creates art under the name New Mama, shaped Preservation of Nature out of vegetation, as commentary on deforestation in the DRC. Right: Plastic Man, fashioned by Bestaguy Bayoka, is just one of the Ndaku Ya Life Is Beautiful collective’s artworks inspired by what Gladieu calls “the worrying invasion of plastic.”

Kitete’s Mirror Man is a dandy in a three-piece suit, according to Gladieu. He says, “The broken mirror is a reflection of what the West has inflicted on the Congo and the lives it has shattered.”