Moffat Takadiwa turns plastic waste across Zimbabwe into record of extraction and repair

In Harare, Zimbabwe, artist Moffat Takadiwa gathers the hard leftovers of global consumption and works them into surfaces that feel unexpectedly tender, bodily, and full of memory. Computer keys, toothbrush heads, bottle caps, buttons, combs, and nail polish parts are sorted and built into works that hover between textile, sculpture, and archive. From across the room, they can read as ceremonial skins, shields, or oversized pieces of jewelry.

Up close, the image breaks apart into thousands of small plastic fragments, each one carrying traces of use, trade, waste, and touch. Through that patient remaking, Takadiwa turns discard into a material language of repair.

Through that shift in scale, Takadiwa’s work reveals a softer method. His practice begins with hard, discarded, mass-produced objects, then slows them down through handwork. His work carries a critique of colonial trade, consumer excess, and ecological damage, and reaches that critique through the patient act of remaking.

The afterlife of colonial extraction in Harare

Moffat Takadiwa’s material language is inseparable from Zimbabwe’s recent history and from the landscape around Harare, where imported waste has become part of the capital city’s outskirts. The artist‘s studio is based in Mbare, one of the country ’s major recycling centers 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.

‘The reason Moffat Takadiwa uses discarded found materials is to show us how the colonial project ravaged through his people and their land,‘ In a 2024 designboom interview with Southern Guild, the gallery framed his use of found materials. ‘Zimbabwe’s plentiful natural resources are conspicuous in their absence.‘

With this in mind, the fragments of plastic waste are evidence of a trade imbalance that leaves behind residue instead of renewal, covering once-lush edges of the city with the afterlife of other economies. Takadiwa gathers those leftovers and gives them another kind of weight. His surfaces turn waste into a record of extraction, land, labor, and survival in a place where global systems remain visible on the ground.

Plastic fragments become woven surfaces

Across Takadiwa’s wall works, accumulation becomes a kind of structure. Computer and calculator keys, toothbrushes, nail clips, buttons, and bottle-cap parts are sorted, drilled, threaded, and gathered into fields of color 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.

Much of the work’s force comes from that material tension. In pieces such as Propaganda Devices and Blared Vision, dark keys gather into thick surfaces, while pale strands fall loose from the composition. The objects feel bodily, even though their materials come from offices, bathrooms, beauty routines, and global shipping routes. They hold the blunt facts of plastic waste while taking on the presence of something worn, carried, or inherited.

Language, memory, and broken alphabets

Among Takadiwa’s most charged materials, the keyboard key brings language into the work in physical form, through loose letters, numbers, symbols, and blank fragments of communication. 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.

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.

Scale gives the work a bodily presence

Takadiwa’s installations expand this language into space, giving the same small materials a larger force. 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 are offered both weight and fragility.

As visitors move beneath and around the suspended forms, the work shifts from image to environment. The pieces feel archaeological and contemporary at the same time, as if the remains of consumer culture had been gathered into floating bodies. The gallery becomes a place where waste is held in suspension, made visible before it can be forgotten.

Craft as a future-facing method

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.

Within radical softness, that sense of time matters. Takadiwa gives discarded objects a second language without cleaning away their past. His works hold beauty and discomfort together. They ask what forms of repair become possible when waste is treated as evidence, and when the hand becomes a tool for reading the systems that produced it.