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
Takadiwa's studio is based in Mbare, one of the country's major recycling centres and an important hub for the informal economy, and his works are made from materials recovered from dumping sites around the capital, along with waste from a clothing factory. This is not incidental to the work; it is the argument. Zimbabwe's outskirts have become repositories for the leftovers of other economies, and the imported plastic that covers them is a visible record of a trade imbalance that delivers consumption without renewal. As the Southern Guild gallery framed it in a 2024 interview with Designboom, the reason Takadiwa uses discarded found materials is to show how the colonial project ravaged through his people and their land and that Zimbabwe's plentiful natural resources are conspicuous in their absence. The plastic fragments that litter Harare's edges are evidence of that absence, and Takadiwa gathers them deliberately, giving them another kind of weight and a second life as surfaces that record what extraction leaves behind.
How Takadiwa threads plastic fragments into woven sculptures that behave like cloth
Computer and calculator keys, toothbrushes, nail clips, buttons, and bottle-cap parts are sorted, drilled, threaded, and gathered into fields of colour and texture. The process gives the materials a strange softness. A keyboard key stays hard in the hand, but in mass, threaded beside hundreds of others, it begins to behave like cloth. This material tension is central to how the work operates. The objects are unambiguously industrial; they come from offices, bathrooms, beauty routines, and global shipping routes, but assembled at scale, they take on the presence of something worn, carried, or passed down. In pieces like Propaganda Devices and Blared Vision, dark keys gather into dense surfaces while pale strands fall loose from the composition, making the works feel bodily in a way that their raw materials do not prepare you for. The craft is slow and deliberate, and that slowness is part of the point.
Keyboard keys, broken alphabets, and the physical language of colonial memory
Among Takadiwa's most charged materials is the keyboard key, which brings language into the work in literal, physical form. In works like White Circle and Re-Reading Korekore, keys gather into circular fields and dense black-and-white surfaces, turning the alphabet into something closer to beadwork or code. The Korekore are a Shona-speaking people of northern Zimbabwe, and the work's title points directly at the colonial disruption of indigenous language and knowledge systems, with the plastic keys of imported technology standing in for the tools of that disruption. Letters, numbers, symbols, and blank fragments of communication accumulate into surfaces that are rich with meaning and deliberately difficult to read, which is, in itself, a kind of statement about who gets to write and who gets written over.
From wall works to full installations: How scale transforms plastic waste into the environment
In Vestiges of Colonialism, shown at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, suspended white forms hang beneath the skylit ceiling like skins, vessels, or oversized fragments of clothing. Their pale surfaces are built from repeated plastic parts and offer both weight and fragility. As visitors move through and beneath the suspended forms, the work shifts from image to environment. What might read as abstract sculpture at a distance becomes, at proximity, an accumulation of recognisable consumer objects: toothbrush heads, bottle parts, keys gathered into shapes that feel archaeological and contemporary at the same time. The gallery becomes a place where waste is held in suspension, made visible before it can be forgotten or buried under the next wave of imports.
Beauty products, body politics, and the new works entering Takadiwa's material world
In recent works such as Combed Hair, Pink Nails, and The Crown (2), beauty and self-presentation enter the material field. Plastic toothbrush heads, combs, nail polish parts, and keyboard keys form large hanging compositions with dark grounds, pale accents, and fringe-like edges. Their titles point toward the body, while the materials speak of consumer goods and synthetic afterlives. By bringing beauty products into the same visual and material field as the keyboards and bottle caps that dominate his earlier work, Takadiwa expands the critique. The body becomes another site of extraction of ideals imported alongside products, of self-presentation shaped by the same global systems that deposit plastic on the edges of Harare. The Crown (2) and Muchapihwa Korona, both from 2026, bring this together in works that are formally elegant and politically pointed in equal measure.
Why Takadiwa's craft-based method is a political act, not just an aesthetic one
Although Takadiwa's work speaks to environmental damage and colonial histories, its force comes through making. The slow threading, sorting, and assembling are part of the argument. Craft becomes a way to interrupt the speed of extraction and disposal. It makes time visible. This is the logic that holds the practice together. Where extraction is fast, extraction is forgettable, and extraction leaves behind objects with no second life, Takadiwa's method is the deliberate opposite: slow, attentive, handmade, and insistent on giving discarded things a new language without erasing their history. His works hold beauty and discomfort together without resolving the tension between them, which is precisely what makes them worth sitting with.
