Laying Waste to History: Recyclia and Urban Art Traditions in Mozambique

ABSTRACT

The present article examines the material and cultural foundations of art made with recycled materials in Mozambique, assessing the continuities (and discontinuities) it exhibits with urban art elsewhere. It connects the longstanding practice of recycling street waste into artwork to economic hardship, colonial history, the environmental crisis, and the increasing influence of hip hop and global urban cultural trends. While the scholarly discourse surrounding urban art has tended to focus on the street as an exhibition space and the use of materials such as spray paints that remain unaffordable for many in Africa, this study argues that despite their prevailing recourse to indoor exhibition, many of Mozambique's street ‘recyclists’ harbour similar aims, practices, and concerns to urban artists elsewhere. Considering artwork by a wide range of artists and of varying technologies, media, and overall complexity, the article thus seeks to connect existing scholarship on the use of recyclia in African arts to the much-theorised practices of street art, graffiti and style writing.

KEYWORDS:

• street art
• recyclia
• urban Mozambique
• hip hop
• graffiti
• intervention

How do you make street art if you cannot afford paint? The question is not necessarily a hypothetical one: in Mozambique, for example, where the minimum wage in some sectors is as low as 60 dollars (‘Governo Aprova Novos Salários Mínimos’ 2019), a single tin or can of spray paint may cost a tenth of one’s monthly income. Of course, paint is not the only way of making arte urbana, as it is known in Portuguese, and as this article will argue, Mozambicans find many other creative and compelling means of doing so. However, the consequences of the relative expense of artistic materials are arguably discernible on the streets of Maputo. While recent years have seen a small handful of striking murals commissioned in the city, the cartoon-like figures, throw-ups, and graffiti tags that often decorate – or for others, blight – modern urban centres are difficult to come by.¹ On the contrary, many of Maputo’s walls and buildings, especially those in residential areas, have been turned into advertisements by multinational corporations such as Vodafone, Coca-Cola, Unilever and Pepsi (pictured in Figure 1), for whom paint, by contrast, is evidently not in short supply. In most cases, residents receive little or no financial reward for consenting to the transformation of their houses’ exterior masonry into low-cost billboards. Many are enticed by unfulfilled promises; Lucia Gazite, for example, who sells soft drinks to passers-by on the Avenida Acordos de Lusaka, alleges that she was offered a sun umbrella in return for allowing her 12-metre wall to be covered with a Pepsi logo, and yet months after the work was completed, the umbrella had yet to materialise (Bentley 2012). Coca-Cola makes no pretence to compensate recipients financially, who, they claim, are ‘only too happy to get a free facelift on their premises’. Their comments, disingenuous perhaps, nevertheless allude to the gaping material inequalities in the country that put conventional artistic media beyond the reach of many, allowing the walls of the city’s poor to become endless advertising spaces for the very international companies that benefit from such low labour costs.²

Figure 1. Pepsi logos cover boundary walls in Maputo. Avenida Acordos de Lusaka, Mozambique, 25 April 2012. Source: Aaron Cleveland (2012), courtesy of The Ecologist.

The transformation of city walls into billboards, coupled with the widespread poverty to which they in part testify, might seem to augur little in the way of street art in Maputo, but there are arguably numerous other ways in which citizens intervene artistically in the complex fabric of advertising, commerce, and the socio-economic inequalities associated with urban spaces and architecture. One such example, which fittingly appears to criticise the drinks industry, is the annual work of the Mozambican Association of Recycling (AMOR), who since 2015 have enlisted the help of local children to construct enormous Christmas trees from discarded plastic bottles (Machado 2016). The impressively neat and striped sculptures, which glitter in the sun and can be found around Maputo as well as in other cities (pictured here in the tourist resort of Inhambane, Figure 2), speak a very different truth to the expansionist approach of Coca-Cola, returning the waste this and other companies produce to the street for display and contemplation, while ironising the symbolism of Christmas to highlight its consumerist excesses. One of the largest trees to date, organised by AMOR in 2016 and involving 400 children working with over 7000 plastic bottles, represents a significant educational, creative, and political achievement, standing six metres tall outside Maputo’s City Hall and Cathedral. Of course, these structures cannot be easily equated with murals or graffiti in Mozambique or elsewhere; indeed, these latter two are themselves distinct artistic processes, ranging from highly stylised, commissioned works to the spontaneous tags and throw-ups made by marginalised groups and individuals, often erased to make way for more iconographic art (Pavoni 2019, 67). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to identify common goals and purposes among these diverse examples, all of which exploit the cracks and loopholes in the urban environment where individual or collective agency can be asserted, reminiscent of Michel de Certeau's (1984, 92–93) analogy of the difference between an official, idealised map of the city and the myriad routes that citizens perform on their wanderings. Maputo’s plastic trees, emphasising the lived experiences of citizens marred by polluting multinational corporations, as well as litterers in the community and the failures of municipal rubbish collection, deploy markedly different technologies to conventional urban art, but they are no less effective in articulating pressing social problems; indeed, their message is undoubtedly heightened by their (re)use of free, waste materials in a context where paints are expensive and litter is in places omnipresent.

Figure 2. Christmas tree made from recycled plastic bottles in Inhambane. Source: Photo courtesy of sapo.pt, https://www.sapo.pt/noticias/atualidade/arvore-de-natal-de-maputo-junta-sete-mil_56792c5bf945fd0c5130dc16.

Examining Mozambique’s rich tradition of making art with recyclia, alongside a number of painted murals that have recently been created in Maputo, this article explores the continuities, ruptures and dialogues that the practice exhibits with street art both within the country and on other continents; indeed, it argues that critical analysis of urban art generally may benefit from considering areas where gathering and recycling the street’s waste, rather than painting its walls, is a more common and established practice. As Amy Schwartzott (2019) has demonstrated, since at least the 1990s, artists from around Mozambique have been using recyclia to ‘chronicle their society from bits and pieces of its discarded histories’, producing a range of sculptures, African masks, furniture, clothing, and collages. The resulting products have accompanied and participated in Mozambique’s turbulent history since its independence in 1975, marked by a fifteen-year Civil War ending in 1992 – the decommissioned weapons of which were some of the first objects to be recycled into artwork – as well as stubbornly high poverty levels, urbanisation, and more recently, environmental pollution and the climate crisis. While only some of these works of art are subsequently displayed in the street – many are presented in exhibition spaces or sold to private consumers for economic support – they almost invariably use its diverse materials, from Rita Torres, who in the wake of Cyclone Idai in 2019 began making furniture and clothing with the many uprooted acacias left strewing the city of Beira, to Manuel Bata, who makes African masks and collages from discarded pans and scrap metal. The aim of this study is therefore twofold: firstly, and following Schwartzott’s work, to assess how the objectives of Mozambican ‘recyclists’ have evolved to grapple with these varied socio-political issues, considering figures of differing degrees of renown; and, secondly, not least since the tentative rise, in recent years, of painted murals in the city that even incorporate recyclia, to what extent their work might constitute a distinctly African style of arte urbana, characterised by freely accessible street materials and an emphasis on objects and sculptures.

Although African recycled art clearly shares its urban focus, and indeed origins, with street art and graffiti on other continents, then, the scholarly debates surrounding each, while extensive, have to date entered into little dialogue with one another. Graffiti, as Ulrich Blanché (2015) notes, is typically associated with the global spread of Style Writing since its origins in the USA in the 1960s, a movement from which street art is derived, but today often distinct. Even so, studies of each tend to focus on the street as an exhibition space, at least implicitly regarding such urban interventions as ‘applied to surfaces’ (Blanché 2015, 33), whether agreeably or in a manner amounting to vandalism, although ‘excavation’ street art, as pioneered by Portuguese artist VHILS (see Figure 3), who uses chisels (and more lately, explosives) to unearth faces in city walls, demonstrates how supplementing the urban landscape may involve taking from, as well as adding to it materially. The very term ‘street art’, meanwhile, which has currency in academic as well as common parlance, differs slightly from the increasing use of ‘post-graffiti’ and ‘urban art’, which include works that may not have clear links to graffiti, Style Writing, or hip-hop cultures more generally (Blanché 2015, 33). The Portuguese term arte urbana, which has equivalence in other romance languages, is similarly more inclusive, connoting the general context of the art rather than its exhibition in the street specifically. Still, the debates that have given rise to these nuances in terminology have not typically involved African contexts, nor looked far beyond city surfaces. Indeed, other artistic traditions from Europe have placed great emphasis on everyday objects, such as the 1960s Arte Povera movement that saw sculptures made from stones and scrap metal but they have not apparently been connected in analysis either to the chronicling impulses of African recycled art or to the citizen-led, interventionist aims of urban art more broadly.

Figure 3. Alexandre Farto AKA VHILS (Seixal, Portugal, 1987) Portrait of elderly man amid urban renewal projects in Alfama, Lisbon, 2012. Source: Image courtesy of Stick2Target: Urban Art from Portugal (www.stick2target.com), 2012.

On the other hand, the use of recycled materials to make art has a well-established history in Africa, being the subject of a seminal study by Allen Roberts in 1992, who analyses the rearticulation (or reiteration) of Western products in African contexts. For Roberts, the use of recyclia has the potential to ironise hegemonic brands, products and iconography; he provides the memorable example of a boy from Dakar who makes oil lamps out of blown electric lightbulbs, repurposing waste at the same time as he illustrates a lack of electricity in his city that is (or was then) as ubiquitous as its abundance in the first world (Roberts 1992, 62). As Susan Seriff (1997, 48–49) notes, the ‘process of creatively “misusing” the detritus of the industrial age’ is perhaps inherently ironic, the irony expressed ‘both visually, in the recycled product itself, and conceptually, in the process of its transformation.’ Seriff (1997, 51) imagines the recycled work as a collision of worlds, a ‘reference to two or more distinct times, technologies, and meaning systems, of which the one, usually dominant, has been artfully subverted by its incorporation into the other’. Even so, although the conceptual implications of recycled art have been widely explored by critics, the material circumstances behind its flourishing in Africa are complex and yet to be clearly defined. Jordan Fenton (2016) argues that economics deserves greater attention in analysis of African art, and Schwartzott (2016, 208) finds some basis for connecting the use of recyclia to poverty, with artist Butcheca remarking that, ‘I work with materials that I have – what I haven’t, I can’t use’. However, she finds many other motivations among artists, such as the educative power of recycling, disparities between sculptors and those that purchase their works, and a desire to help with cleaning streets, suggesting an element of public intervention. Indeed, the extent of Africa’s ‘waste management crisis’ (Godfrey et al. 2019) should not be overlooked: in Maputo, the growing number of informal rubbish dumps and fly tips are hazardously rummaged through by the poorest in society, with the collapse of a large tip in 2019 killing seventeen people in Hulene district (Matias 2019). Ineffective waste infrastructures thus make rubbish and litter a less forgettable, more pervasive aspect of everyday life in the city, and perhaps consequently of art. Furthermore, as Roberts (1992) notes, African works of art have traditionally had a specific purpose in addition to their aesthetic value, be it practical, civil or ceremonial (such as masks, which are used in rituals), accounting in part for the predominance of material objects over drawings and paintings today. Waldemar Januszczak goes as far as to claim that making art from rubbish in Africa is a ‘pancontinental obsession’ (Savage 2008, 79); however, even if the tradition has emerged organically on the continent, the communication it fosters between the so-called first and third worlds suggests that such characterisations risk isolating it in analysis from the very regions with which it engages. Today, as cities in Mozambique become increasingly connected to urban and hip-hop cultures elsewhere, there is all the more reason to consider its urban art in relation to that produced on other corners of the globe.

The present study therefore examines works of art that herald from, and in some cases synthesise, artistic traditions with diverse geographical origins. Recycled art in Mozambique, whether or not (as seems likely) inspired by that produced in neighbouring countries, has typically had a sharp local focus and significance, as demonstrated by one of its landmark achievements, the ‘Transforming Weapons into Ploughshares’ project funded by the Christian Council of Mozambique in 1995. As part of the initiative, Gonçalo Mabunda began to solder bullets and dissembled rifles from the Civil War to make sculptures and furniture, including his magnificently intricate ‘Peace Thrones’, such as those exhibited at the Jack Bell Gallery in London (2020, pictured in Figure 4). The objects exploit the duality of recyclia to great effect, fashioning technologies of violence and death into domestic places of rest, gesturing to the nation’s fragile transition to political stability. Mabunda’s successful work with weapons also illustrates how peculiar national circumstances (and not just poverty) have shaped and popularised the craft of recycling. The influences of local traditions are especially evident in the first part of this study, which concentrates on household products, sculptures, and modern incarnations of the African mask – one of the most prevalent objects to be fashioned from waste materials in Mozambique, given its cultural and ceremonial importance across the continent. The second part then turns to the increasing popularity of hip hop, street art, and graffiti, analysing a series of recent murals and throw-ups in Maputo that suggest growing influences from urban art practices around the world. As we shall see, although the histories of these traditions may be distinct, there are several ways in which, today at least, they run in parallel and at times converge with each other, reaffirming the relationship between the streets and the art they exhibit and produce.

Figure 4. Gonçalo Mabunda (Maputo, 1975) The Throne of the Living. Source: Image courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery (copyright and with permission of the artist).

From weapons to tyres: Recyclia and postcolonial history

While recycled artwork gestures simultaneously to two different periods or meaning systems, the African mask has often been consigned to one interpretation or another, depending on the culture in which it is perceived and received. As Ladislas Segy (1976, 1) notes, the Westerner ‘considers the mask as a work of art. The African considers the mask as a necessary ritual instrument or cult object, a product of his particular culture’. This observation is itself rather dated, given that many of today’s craftsmen in Africa produce masks with the aim of selling them to (mostly Western) tourists and consumers, even if they incorporate and reaffirm ethnic traditions in the process. Moreover, the very concept of art in the west came to be defined, in the Romantic era, against an opposing notion of primitivism that nonetheless featured prominently in works of the period (Miller 2004), testifying paradoxically to the cultural exchanges around the colonial world that its binaries portrayed as hierarchical relationships. Today, the use of recyclia to create masks continues to foster connections between Western and African perspectives, though arguably inverting the historical dynamics in the process, appropriating the destructive weapons, or ugly waste, of industrial nations just as Picasso painted African masks into Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The following discussion therefore focuses on masks that, as recycled objects, ironise and disrupt the relationship between the cultural consumer and the culture consumed. Tracing the evolving experiences of urban life in the country, the analysis then turns to other works of art and craft fashioned from recyclia, such as lanterns and capulanas made with the debris from tropical storms. An apparent shift towards litter and environmental concerns entails a growing element of educational and interventional intent, providing a departure point for considering murals and painted works later in the study, where traditional modes of artistic production continue to endure.

Although it was the Peace Thrones that brought Mabunda international renown, his sculptural oeuvre includes an impressive array of African masks, some of which have been exhibited in faraway places, such as his 2019 series at the Kur Art Gallery in San Sebastián, crafted chiefly from bullets and scrap metal. The largest of the group, titled simply Máscara and shown in Figure 5, exemplifies the duality of recyclia, incorporating weapons while distorting and removing facial features. Standing well over a metre tall, it is barely recognisable (or functional) as a mask, recoding this mainstay of African art to serve as a witness to the brutal acts of violence wrought by colonialism and its aftermath. If Western art sought to define itself against primitivism, the weapons in Mabunda’s masks – brought to Mozambique primarily by Western powers – question the dialectics of civilisation and savagery, and thus one of the ideological pillars on which colonial history was based. Mabunda’s work has become iconic in the Mozambican, and arguably African, arts scene, yet despite his widespread acclaim, his repudiation of conventional artistic media in favour of everyday materials reflects the close relationships he maintains with both the streets of Maputo and the wider community of artists working with recyclia in the city, whose longstanding meeting point is the Núcleo de Arte, founded in colonial times in 1921 to promote artistic pursuits. As Mabunda noted during an interview I conducted with him in Maputo (5 March 2020), his house – the gates of which are adorned with simpler masks made from rusted metal – lies just a few blocks from the Núcleo, and he maintains close ties with the many artists that create and exhibit their work there. Interestingly, he alleges that his career as a sculptor began with his use of dead acacia wood from the trees that shade Maputo’s avenues, and in turn other objects and detritus from the street. It is no small irony that some of his masks have since been exhibited in the streets of the capital, in brightly lit displays behind the windows of high-end real estate (Chilengue 2020), though this irony is of course the essence of recyclia, insofar as the originally discarded object undergoes a détournement, attaining unexpected meaning and visibility. While few other artists in the country are granted the opportunity to display their work so publicly, Mabunda’s success does not detract from the importance of his cultural and material surroundings, and the traces of his home city remain prominent in his artistic methods and approaches.

Figure 5. Gonçalo Mabunda (Maputo, 1975) Máscara Recycled war materials; 123 × 95 × 20 cm Kur Art Gallery, London, 2019. Source: Image courtesy of Kur Art Gallery (copyright and with permission of the artist).

Despite Mabunda’s work with decommissioned weapons popularising the recyclia movement in Mozambique, then, other waste materials have typically appeared alongside them in sculpture, and today they are used widely by artists in the country, often shifting the focus away from the legacy of colonialism onto the aesthetics and problems associated with urbanisation. Manuel Bata, a contemporary of Mabunda who has worked as a self-taught sculptor and collagist since the 1980s, cuts and solders scrap metal to fashion masks, sculptures and collages, often depicting expressive faces of noteworthy intricacy. A variety of waste objects are selected and curated, from bottle tops and chicken wire to door hinges, cutlery, and saucepan lids, with the latter featuring especially prominently, forming the base of a mask exhibited at the Fundação Fernando Leite Couto in 2018 (Figure 6). This mask is almost as abstract as Mabunda’s exhibits in San Sebastián, with a series of concentric circles formed by a frame made from fencing wire, enclosing a recognisable face with characteristically downcast, crescent-like eyes. The precision in the relief work is all the more impressive given the unwieldiness of the scrap materials, which are consequently humanised and softened. As with other recycled artwork, there is a play of the familiar and unfamiliar: manmade objects formally used for functional or mechanical purposes are fashioned into an emotional, human face surrounded by a sunlike halo. The transformation of manmade objects into man himself seems to question the centrality of the human in the material (and natural) world, echoing the post-humanist principle that technology is not ‘a mere prosthesis to human identity’ but rather ‘integral’ to it (Nayar 2014, 8, emphasis added). Thus while most traditional masks are carved from wood (and cooking pots from clay), Bata’s pan-lid masks attest to the recent industrialisation of many African cities, along with the proliferation of modern materials, technologies, and waste that has accompanied their growth, most of which, like the weapons in Mabunda’s work, are imported from abroad. However, while his work again speaks to a global audience, some of the features of more traditional masks from Mozambique are nevertheless incorporated. Perhaps the most detailed section of the mask in Figure 6 is its left cheek, which – with careful score marks and tiny beads of solder – sports the distinctive face tattoos of the Makonde people, an ethnic group spanning northern Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya.³ Their mask-making practices, as Paolo Israel (2014) demonstrates, have evolved over time to respond to colonialism, revolution and other historical changes, rendering their artistic influence upon Bata’s work a fitting reminder of the unexpectedly dynamic nature of local traditions. With the urban population having almost quadrupled in just forty years, the production of masks with industrial materials and waste products renews their longstanding engagement with colonialism to address the similarly homogenising forces of globalisation.

Figure 6. Manuel Bata (Maputo, 1958) Máscara Recycled scrap metal Os Sentimentos das mãos, Fundação Fernando Leite Couto, Maputo, 2018. Source: Image courtesy of Mapa das Artes (@MapadasArtesMoz, 23 November 2018).

The success of Bata and Mabunda’s work at home and abroad has, of course, helped them to expand their range of tools and technologies, even if they continue to use materials from the city’s streets and scrapyards. Conceptually too, their work grapples with complex problems and high-brow works of art: the titular collage of Bata’s Metais e Conceito (Metals and Concept) exhibition at the Kulungwana gallery in Maputo (Figure 7), for example, with its seemingly dismembered figures, round faces, and haunting expressions, bears striking similarities to the paintings of Mozambique’s most celebrated artist, Malangatana Ngwenya, whose work depicts the horrors endured by Mozambique during its struggle for independence and subsequent Civil War. Interestingly, Malangatana also produced a number of urban artworks during the post-revolutionary period, alongside other artists in Mozambique who were selected by the ruling party, FRELIMO, to commemorate the struggle for independence with a series of murals,⁴ reflecting the search for decolonised imagery and greater civic visibility after the repressive Portuguese New State. Bata’s reconfiguration of Malangatana’s legacy to reflect the urban pressures of Mozambique today both invites historical parallels between the experiences of colonialism and globalisation, and underscores the degree to which this art of humble origins – Bata describes his experiences of hunger as a child – has carved a space for itself in Mozambican art history, attracting diverse and in some cases international audiences. Nevertheless, the practice is far from an elite one, and many artists and artisans,⁵ who without proceeds from exhibitions typically craft their work for private sale, are often more spontaneous in nature, deploying lower technologies to make use of the eclectic range of street rubbish available in the vicinity. What follows, then, is a discussion of masks, decorative clothes and furniture that, while lacking some of the complexity of Bata and Mabunda’s work, use litter to bring their urban and local origins clearly into focus, showcasing the everyday materials (and pollution) of modern Mozambican cities alongside remnants of ethnic traditions. As we shall see, their widespread preoccupation with the environment lends their work an increasingly interventionist quality, bringing it still closer into alignment with urban art on other continents.

Figure 7. Manuel Bata (Maputo, 1958) Metais e Conceito Recycled scrap metal Metais e Conceito, Estação Ferroviária de Maputo, 2016. Source: Image courtesy of Associação Kulungwana (copyright and with permission of the artist).

The Núcleo de Arte provides an invaluable avenue of support for budding creatives in Maputo, housing a co-operative of artists and providing workspaces, an exhibition hall, and a bar and restaurant where casual visitors can view and purchase works of art. Its many visitors over the years have ranged from Malagatana and celebrated sculptor Alberto Chissano (Fall & Pivin 2002, 311), to young artists and artisans looking to hone their skills with improved access to materials and studio space. Many work with litter and waste, with African masks proving such a popular craft that it would be impossible to include more than a fraction of them here.⁶ Nevertheless, a selection of masks on display at the time of research, made by Mussagy Talquichand (who goes by the name of Falcão) serves to demonstrate the variety of media and techniques in use. Falcão’s Makonde mask, which he is seen making in Figure 8, features similar tribal tattoos to Bata’s in Figure 6, though here they are made from strips of metal nailed to a base of reclaimed acacia wood. The eyes are formed from non-matching spigot handles, and the hair from cable ties woven through drill holes at the top. Another of his masks, shown in Figure 9, is made exclusively from a single sheet of rusted metal, folded and punched with holes to create facial features, deploying very simple technologies at no material cost, while to its left sits a decidedly more playful and cartoon-like effort, featuring an old, plastic CD player mounted onto a wooden base, endowed with electrical wires for hair. In all these examples, human features are to be found in surprising places; indeed, in a manner similar to Bata’s metalwork, they surface in the very objects that are typically rendered abject, disavowed as waste to ‘guarantee the symbolic consistency of our “sphere” of life’ (Žižek 2012, 372).

Figure 8. Mussagy Narane ‘Falcão’ Talaquichand (Nampula, 1976), working on a Makonde mask in his studio in Maputo, 2020. Source: Author’s own photograph (27 February 2020), with permission of the artist.

Figure 9. Mussagy Narane ‘Falcão’ Talaquichand (Nampula, 1976) Two African masks made from recycled materials. Source: Author’s own photograph (27 February 2020), with permission of the artist.

As Falcão remarks in his correspondence with Schwartzott (2014, 163), albeit in relation to his paintings, his work aims to capture ‘the day-to-day of the Mozambican population, the everyday life of people in Mozambique’, lending weight to the suggestion earlier that the country’s recyclists emphasise lived experiences in the face of global changes, seeking out humanity wherever it seems to have been banished or neglected. In this sense, it is not difficult to draw parallels with mural-based, street-exhibited art on other continents, including, again, Portuguese artist VHILS, whose ‘excavation’ technique creates weathered human faces, often of those displaced by urban and social forces (Figure 3). Interestingly, a compatriot of VHILS, Bordalo II, has also achieved renown for his murals of imposing animals made from wall-mounted, scrap materials, which seek to critique ‘the excessive production and consumption of stuff’ (Bordalo 2022). Tempting though it might be for scholars of Lusophone or postcolonial studies, it is difficult to establish any direct influences between these Portuguese and Mozambican artists: both VHILS and Bordalo stress their experiences of growing up in Lisbon in the 1990s, where they encountered graffiti and other forms of street art, and none of the recyclists interviewed in this study cited influences from outside of Africa. Still, the emergence of similar media and technologies evinces the interconnectedness, in economic and cultural terms, of Mozambican cities to those elsewhere, and as we shall see shortly, the burgeoning popularity of hip-hop in the country may indeed have approximated its recycled artwork to urban art on other continents.

The shifting relationships between the streets, city waste, and artistic pursuits in Mozambique are depicted compellingly in a recent documentary made by researchers from the Bloco 4 Foundation, a collaborative initiative examining activism, citizenship and social policies in the country. Moving With Garbage (Sitoe & Macamo 2022) showcases a number of artists and artisans whose work reflects the ongoing diversification of recycled objects and the role they play in cultural and material life today. The documentary follows many of the principles of ethnographic filmmaking and is a thoughtful work in its own right, opening with panoramic shots of a mountain of rubbish on Maputo’s periphery scaled by hundreds of people in search of scraps; it also edits out the interviewers’ questions and prompts, leaving the artists to tell their own stories. Mudungaze, an artist and sculptor based in the city, makes use of e-waste such as USB cables, old mobile phones, remote controls and electric fans, among other materials; in the film, he sits in front of three of his own collages, neatly framed and made primarily from bottle tops. He cites Mabunda as a key inspiration for his work and appears to update his message for the present day, observing that just as Africa did not have guns prior to European colonialism, so does the lion’s share of its rubbish today herald from faraway countries. Like Bata, Mudungaze critiques the hypocrisies and inequalities of globalisation in the same way that Mabunda’s sculptures articulate the violence and destruction wrought by colonial powers. Meanwhile, one of the main motives of the artists featured in Moving With Garbage is, in an avowedly instrumentalist sense, a desire to educate wider society about the effects of litter and pollution, in part by calling into question the aesthetics of modernity through the reuse of long-forgotten objects. Vânia Gonçalo, for example, filmed searching for materials at scrapyards and garages, runs a successful trade working with degraded tyres, which she covers with fabrics and goatskins to produce colourful pouffes and baskets. In the film, she cites environmental protection as one of her key concerns, noting the understudied impact of tyres and the vast quantities that are scrapped after losing their treads. She also prizes them for their local significance, however, pointing to their different ‘afterlives’ in Mozambican society, from playthings used by children on the street to informal seats placed in parks and gardens. Again, the resulting products implicate a global audience while engaging with the local context, fostering connections between the immediate urban surroundings where the mountains of waste grow higher each year, and the faraway places that in part contribute to them.

As the memory of the Civil War begins to wane in a country where the median age is just 17, then, and the state of the environment achieves greater prominence as urbanisation accelerates and the climate warms, it seems fair to say that the scope of artistic work with recyclia has adapted to the evolving conditions of life in Mozambique, ever more concentrated in often waste-stricken cities. Some of the creative responses to the devastation left by Cyclone Idai, for example, which hit Beira, Mozambique’s second city, in 2019, warrant particular mention for their recourse to longstanding artistic practices as a means to highlight recent impacts of the climate crisis. The cyclone, which left more than 1500 dead and hundreds of thousands without clean water or electricity (Williams 2021), overwhelmed municipal infrastructure; waste services struggled to clear the tide of rubbish after the waters subsided, with hundreds of felled acacia trees and razed buildings rendering the city impassable (Sebastião 2019). Faced thus with the vast debris of climate breakdown, which presents an existential threat to the entire Mozambican coastline, Rita José Timba (who uses her artistic name, Negra Moz), having witnessed the roof being torn off the newly refurbished Centro Cultural da Beira, where she works, began collecting the wood from the acacias to make furniture and decorative pieces for the home (Figure 10). As she remarked during our interview (Beira, 3 February 2020), the fact that the materials were left by the storm made them ideal candidates for their refashioning into neat domestic objects, emphasising the smallness and fragility of the human world; like Mabunda’s peace throne, closer acquaintance with the media used reveals one of the darkest moments in the city’s history. The same is true of Torres’ more decorative products, which range from lanterns crafted from fishing rope to sandals made from tyres left strewn by the cyclone, lined with traditionally patterned capulanas. The refashioning of these products of natural disaster into brightly coloured African clothing and personal products for the home recalls Schwartzott’s comments on masks made with recyclia, articulating ‘cultural and artistic practices of the past’ within ‘contemporary contexts’, but they also seem to constitute an act of individual and collective defiance, participating in the widespread community clean-up efforts in the wake of the disaster. As waste and the environment emerge as more common concerns among recyclists, their products become testaments to everyday acts of intervention in cities, fostering a new model of aesthetics and sustainability for future generations to follow.

Figure 10. Rita Temba, AKA Negra Moz (Beira, Mozambique) Clothing and decorative items made with debris from Cyclone Idai, 2020. From left: mirror with acacia frame; lanterns made from fishing rope; sandals made from waste tyres and capulanas. Source: Photographs courtesy of the artist (2021).

Recyclia and street art: The rise of murals

Despite their element of public intervention, and however urban in nature these works of art and cultural artefacts may be – as evidenced by their origins, materiality, and overarching concern with contemporary urban changes – their similarities with the bulk of urban artwork produced outside Africa would seem to end where their exhibition is concerned: almost all are housed in private collections and indoor exhibition spaces, with the exception of AMOR’s recycled Christmas trees and Mabunda’s sculptures on the Avenida Julius Nyerere. In addition, they tend to be contemplative and time-consuming projects, involving less of the spontaneity often associated with street art, although the chance encounters with propitious items of litter while walking around the city restores a degree of creative opportunism. As aforementioned, somewhat piecemeal artistic sponsorship, the relative expense of high-visibility materials such as paint, and a penchant for sculpture and objects in aesthetic pursuits may all go some way towards explaining the limited use of the street as an informal exhibition space, despite the widespread deployment of its materials and detritus by city artists. There are, however, tentative signs that these differences in exhibition vis-à-vis urban art practices elsewhere may also be waning as Mozambican cities become more interconnected with urban and hip-hop cultures from other continents. Examples of these influences include the construction of the country’s first two skate parks on the impoverished periphery of Maputo in 2019,⁷ alongside a smaller ramp in the Parque dos Continuadores, which at the time of research was covered with fresh-looking graffiti tags and throw-ups (Figure 11). More impactful still has been the recent rise of hip-hop and rap music, with figures such as Azagaia, who launched his first album in 2006, becoming increasingly influential critics of the FRELIMO government (Pöysä & Rantala 2018). As two of the key ‘four elements’ of hip-hop culture (Williams 2015, 3), graffiti and MCing tend to be closely interrelated practices, and the spattering of tags and throw-ups around the Parque dos Continuadores points to a growing sense of connection between local citizens and international hip-hop cultures. One such throw-up (Figure 12) was produced by Bruno Mateus (AKA Shot-B), Mozambique’s most active street artist and also a rapper, whose large mural in the centre of Maputo’s shanty district of Mafalala (Figure 13) celebrates the country’s most important anti-colonial writers, several of whom heralded from Mafalala itself, such as Noémia de Sousa and José Craveirinha. In some ways, the mural parallels Mabunda’s work with decommissioned weapons, seeking to recover the memory of the country’s past struggles with the combination of stencils, throw-ups and graffiti articulating the deceased writers’ words in a contemporary medium. Thus while Shot-B’s work aligns more clearly, formally speaking, with the aesthetic practices of hip hop than Mozambique’s established recycling movement, his work is similarly preoccupied with the reconciliation of past and present.

Figure 11. Graffiti and throw-ups cover skate ramp in the Parque dos Continuadores, Maputo, Mozambique. Source: Author’s own photograph (5 March 2020).

Figure 12. Throw-up by street artist Bruno Mateus (AKA Shot-B), near Parque dos Continuadores, Maputo, Mozambique. Source: Author’s own photograph (5 March 2020).

Figure 13. Bruno Mateus (AKA Shot-B) (Maputo, Mozambique, 1983) Mural depicting anti-colonial writers, with citations from their work (Mafalala, Maputo, 2019). Source: Author’s own photograph (28 February 2020).

Mafalala makes for an almost unique place to observe street art in Mozambique, with two other large murals within close proximity of Shot B’s, around one of its major crossroads. This traditionally poor district just outside Maputo’s centre, which became a stronghold of resistance against the Portuguese regime (Laranjeira 2014, 27–30), has been the target of several cultural initiatives in recent years, despite continuing infrastructural problems such as open sewers, unpaved roads, and patchy access to clean water. Spearheading much of the artistic and cultural activity in the neighbourhood is the Mafalala Project run by Ivan Laranjeira who, with funds from the European Union, established the Museu de Mafalala in 2019. The museum, cladded with zinc panelling to celebrate the architecture of the surrounding shanty town, provides an exhibition space for artists and educates visitors about the neighbourhood’s history. Of the three murals commissioned in its vicinity, one in particular stands out for its engagement with its surrounding environment, involving urban materials in a manner that parallels much of the recyclia-based artwork produced in Mozambique. This is the colourful mural, straddling two walls, created by Francisco Vilanculos in 2016 (Figure 14), which follows the widespread tradition of murals ‘incorporating the street physically and in their meaning’ (Chackal 2016, 359). Vilanculos’ piece extends the street in every dimension, as though inviting the viewer to walk in further and explore the busy community that it depicts. The viewing angle, or technically anamorphosis, is key here, and the photographs in Figure 14 illustrate well how the concrete floor is extended off in paint towards the vanishing point, providing a seamless transition from the street to the work of art. The righthand section of the mural is painted onto a wall parallel to, but not level with, the first, ending the fictional ground level a foot or so above the bottom of the exterior wall, thus continuing the play of perspectives. The corrugated zinc roof of the righthand building is recreated with blueish streaks on its wall, celebrating, like the nearby museum, the shanty materials of the neighbourhood. However, while these features lend the mural a degree of realism and harmony with its surroundings, closer inspection reveals a more idealised depiction of what the area and indeed nation might be. Traditions are brought together from Mozambique’s many and diverse regions, such as the tufo dance from Nampula, while two women wearing headscarves gesture to the country’s Muslim population. The children play football and the enduringly popular tyre-rolling game that Vânia refers to in Moving With Garbage (a clever repurposing of street waste) – while the fruit seller’s stock is neatly arranged in the colours of the Mozambican flag. Amidst the aftermath of the country’s Civil War, and more recently the unresolved tensions with Islamic extremists in Cabo Delgado province, the mural is clearly a call for unity in diversity and a celebration of popular traditions. However, it also looks to a cleaner, more sanitary future: the litter strewing the pavement in front of the mural is replaced by small but conspicuous tufts of grass, while the adjacent open sewers, unlike many other architectural features of Mafalala, disappear. Although, therefore, Vilanculos opts for paint as a medium, the question of city waste, cleanliness, and makeshift materials is equally at stake, with urbanisation envisaged alongside – as opposed to displacing – thriving local traditions.

Figure 14. Francisco Vilanculos (Maputo, 1980) Mural depicting local traditions in Mafalala, Maputo, 2016 (left and right side). Source: Photographs courtesy of the artist (vilanculos.weebly.cos), 2021.

The practices and technologies of street artists and those working with recycled materials meet decisively in a still more recent mural in Maputo’s Bairro do Aeroporto, which like Mafalala gave birth to many of the country’s most esteemed writers and artists, including Malangatana himself, whose former house and private collection still stands in the neighbourhood. Inaugurated in June 2019 and designed by Manuel Manjate (Muglia 2019), the large mural spans the ground floor of what was once a brothel in colonial times, and was again funded by the European Union as part of the Nlhamankulu urban regeneration project (Figure 15). It depicts the faces of famous Mozambican artists and sculptors such as Chissano, Chongo and Malangatana, along with scribbled citations, their dates of birth and death (where deceased), and an array of abstract patterns and designs reminiscent of those used in textiles, interspersed with national imagery and symbolism such as gazelle horns, tufo drums, and clay pots. There are evidently similarities with Shot-B’s Mafalala mural in design, with a focus on preserving and recovering the cultural memory of the neighbourhood through stylised representations of key figures that cast them as local heroes. Indeed, as interventions they are both quite formative in nature, involving precise engagement with historical personalities and direct quotations. However, the mural in the Bairro do Aeroporto contains a surprising twist in what is arguably its centrepiece, where a metal doorframe is adorned with recycled scrap metal, nailed and soldered into a recognisable human form (Figure 16). Various discarded objects are used in the collage, including old speakers, an oven tray, a lock, and door handles, while a punctured tin is used for the right eye and the mouth is formed from a rusted drink can. There are also objects that clearly reference or reiterate national traditions: corrugated zinc panels recall the building materials of Maputo’s shanty towns, while bicycle wheel frames recreate the distinctive round faces of Malangatana and Bata’s work. All the more for its bright blue background, which contrasts with the warm colours used for the remainder of the mural, the central panel is particularly distinctive, bringing recyclia into the heart of the artwork and urban display.

Figure 15. Manuel Manjate (Maputo) and local children. Source: Author’s own photograph (7 March 2020).

Figure 16. Manuel Manjate (Maputo) and local children. Detail from mural in the Bairro do Aeroporto, Maputo, 2019. Recycled scrap metal and paint. Source: Author’s own photograph (7 March 2020).

The inclusion of recyclia in the mural, and in particular one that focuses so closely on local history, creates a mural that – to use Schwartzott’s (2019, 47) characterisation of recycled artwork in the country – is ‘quintessentially Mozambican’, whereby the longstanding popularity of recyclia in Mozambique and other African countries meets technologies of urban art seen more globally. Indeed, as Schwartzott argues, the use of recyclia in Mozambique has itself become a source of national pride and belonging, as though by metonymic drift it has come to symbolise artistic cultures in the country more widely. Its deployment in the mural in the Bairro do Aeroporto would thus seem to form part of a process whereby international urban artistic practices are reiterated and inflected with established local cultures, perhaps evident too in the fact that many of the faces painted in the mural were themselves primarily sculptors. Conversely, the display of recyclia as part of a commissioned mural connects the locally popular use of city waste to street art movements elsewhere. The recycled centrepiece also links the mural, which would otherwise seem to dwell on the past, with the present and future, depicting the only anonymous and timeless figure using contemporary materials. Indeed, it is its low-cost media and technologies, coupled with the overall formative tone of the surrounding mural, that arguably lends the collage most impact; its message, in dialogue with the local ‘heroes’ depicted to either side, is perhaps that anyone can change the fate of their street, community, and even nation, through creative pursuits, using simple and abundantly available materials, as has been demonstrated by the trajectories of many of Mozambique’s recyclists themselves. In this light, the inclusion of recyclia in the mural might be interpreted as a symbol or celebration of contemporary Mozambican or African art, a point of dialogue with technologies of street art elsewhere, or a source of inspiration for budding artists in the vicinity who may struggle to afford paints, stencils, and brushes.

Conclusions

Although the richness and variety of artwork made from recyclia in Mozambique is such that a single study could never claim to do it full justice, it is hoped the selection considered here is nonetheless sufficient to draw a series of conclusions about the role such art plays in Mozambican society, the continuities (and discontinuities) it exhibits in relation to other forms of urban art, and perhaps also the relationships that exist between economic circumstance, cultural history, and artistic practices and technologies. On the first point, this study echoes the conclusions of Schwartzott’s work on recyclia in Mozambique that artists select and collate detritus to document – and make sense of – urban and historical changes, from the transition to peacetime after decades of war in 1992, which prompted Mabunda’s experimentation with decommissioned weapons, to the more recent threats of environmental and climate breakdown. In each case, objects from the past are pieced together in new ways, drawing attention to the often violent forces of colonialism and globalisation while reiterating older creative traditions such as mask-making, capulanas, or the lined tattoos of the Makonde. With their predominantly industrial aesthetic, the majority of these works testify to the ongoing urbanisation of Mozambique, even if the passion for recyclia is shared with many of its African neighbours and gained particular traction with the landmark ‘Transforming Weapons into Ploughshares’ project in 1995, so much so that recycled artwork seems itself to have become a symbol of national cultural life. Thematically, too, the artists in question tackle similar issues to urban artists elsewhere: at the forefront of their work is the tension between lived experiences of urban life and the oppressive effects of social and spatial forces, in this case marked by the legacy of war, colonialism, poverty and industrialisation. It could be argued that the growing preoccupation, in recent years, with pollution and the climate crisis in particular has inspired works that not only document the country’s social problems but actively intervene in them, slowly reversing the tide of waste to create products calling for a new approach to aesthetics, materials and sustainability.

However, while the political concerns of Mozambique’s recyclists thus overlap with urban artists on other continents, to what extent their work might be considered part of the same aesthetic or tradition depends in a large part on how the term ‘urban art’ (or even street art) is defined. If it is the use of the street as a public exhibition space that is its distinguishing feature, as seems to be at least implicitly the case in the lion’s share of scholarship on the subject, many of the artists considered here would be excluded: only a small number of their works find their way onto murals, pavements, or street-facing exhibition spaces. However, as Blanché (2015) and others have noted, the critical discourse surrounding urban art (and the related practice of graffiti) itself emerged primarily in response to Western phenomena, and in particular the rise of Style Writing since its origins in the USA in the 1960s. Therefore, while it would clearly be mistaken to equate the work of artists discussed here with other urban art movements around the world – each with their own unique histories – too rigid a scholarly focus on outdoor exhibition and the predominant technologies of Western street art may risk overlooking cultures and geographies that tackle markedly similar issues but with recourse to different media, or indeed how recycling itself, by removing street waste, is in some form an act of public intervention with the potential to become artistic. To begin with, as we have seen, there are tentative signs that artists in Mozambique are themselves becoming more connected to the continuing global diffusion of hip-hop culture, with the mural in the Bairro do Aeroporto combining urban art traditions from both near and afar, alongside a clutch of painted murals from the last decade that echo the recyclists’ focus on materials, human faces, and historical memory, suggesting a growing dialogue between the two traditions. Moreover, the question of Mozambican and African cultural visibility is central to much of the artwork discussed here, which frequently draws attention to the different material circumstances of African urban centres while positioning these as part of the global discourse of modernity, rather than as anachronisms against which modernity has – traditionally perhaps – been constructed. The use of recyclia alone can be interpreted as a testament to the difficulties experienced in accessing paint and other materials, a reality that also, at least in part, lies behind the scarcity of street exhibits, the most ambitious of which have been funded by the European Union. As such, by their very nature, the works of art considered here would seem to invite analysis both in terms of existing artistic practices in Mozambique and its African neighbours, and the worldwide processes and aesthetic movements with which they engage and overlap today. Of course, it is far from so simple as to say that would-be street artists in Mozambique use litter or scrap metal because they cannot afford paint. But viewed within the context of urban art traditions around the world, the extraordinary variety of arts and crafts made from recycled materials in the country has much to contribute to our understanding of how citizens shape and critique often adverse urban environments, exercising agency and preserving memory through artistic endeavour.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the artists at the Núcleo de Arte and the Centro Cultural da Beira, especially Gonçalo Mabunda, Falcão and Rita Timba, for their insights and hospitality. I would also like to thank, in no particular order, Mutxhini Ngenya, Ivan Laranjeira, Tirso Sitoe, André Cardoso, and Conceição Osório for their generosity at the time of research.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David J. Bailey

David J. Bailey is a lecturer in Portuguese cultural studies at the University of Manchester. He took his PhD in Lusophone literatures at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2018. He is the author of Naturalism Against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-Siècle Portugal and Brazil, published by Legenda in 2020, as well as several other articles about Portuguese and Brazilian culture.

Notes

1 Notable exceptions include the commissioned murals in Mafalala and a cluster of graffiti tags and throw-ups around the public skate ramp in Parque dos Continuadores, both of which are discussed later in this article.

2 Coca-Cola Sabco, for example, employs over 400 workers at a packaging plant in nearby Matola, which opened in 2016 after a $130m investment (African News Agency 2016).

3 For further discussion of the Makonde and their tattoo-making practices, see Zachary Kingdon (2002, 9–34, 50–56).

4 This initiative, documented by Moira Forjaz and Susan Meiselas in their photobook Imagens de uma Revolução (1986) saw the creation of several impressive murals in Mozambique, many of which survive today, though their government-led production and cultural distance from hip-hop places these works beyond the key focus of the present study.

5 Incidentally, this distinction has been widely critiqued in art history and with good reason, though the latter term is generally used to encompass wearable and useable objects. See Sally Markowitz (1994, 55–70).

6 For a more detailed and comprehensive discussion of artists working at the Núcleo de Arte, see Schwartzott (2016; 2019).

7 Charity Wonders Around the World oversaw the construction of the first park in Khongolote in 2019, with help from residents and other non-governmental organisation partners.