Moffat Takadiwa Weaves Hope from Trash in the Heart of Zimbabwe

The artist's intricate, wall-based tapestries transform Western post-consumer waste into powerful, layered works that interrogate global cycles of production and disposal.

A long horizontal wall tapestry made of multicolored beads and circular motifs, with white thread bundles hanging from various points, viewed by a person in motion.
Moffat Takadiwa, Propaganda Devices, 2025; computer and laptop keys, nail clips and buttons, 45 1/2 x 134 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim

Moffat Takadiwa’s intricately textured, materially layered works take the form of dazzling, wall-based tapestries made entirely from Western post-consumer waste. His latest body of work, presented in a solo exhibition at Nicodim New York, investigates the economic, geopolitical and sociopolitical dynamics embedded in these discarded materials to unveil the human and environmental forces implicated in global cycles of production, distribution, consumption and disposal.

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In elaborate installations, repurposed toothbrush tubes, fragments of computer keyboards and bottle caps find a “second life” as elements of beautifully reconfigured constellations. These striking works simultaneously serve as poignant aesthetic and political statements, interrogating consumerism, inequality, post-colonial decay and environmental degradation. They also function as material records of Zimbabwe’s contemporary economic and social landscape. By embedding the language of global trade, ecological neglect and post-colonial decay into the very substance of his work, Takadiwa sustains a practice deeply entangled with the larger geopolitical transformations reshaping both the country and the African continent.

He has always been a gatherer, he tells Observer, with a natural sensibility for the textures, forms and energies of materials. He grew up surrounded by the Westernized material world: his father ran the only hardware store in their small town, exposing him early to a steady flow of imported goods and manufactured objects.

rtist Moffat Takadiwa stands with arms crossed, wearing a gray coat and black cap, in front of a mural with colorful geometric shapes.
Moffat Takadiwa. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim

Takadiwa’s relationship with these commodity items has significantly evolved since moving to Harare, Zimbabwe’s densely populated capital. In the urban landscape, such objects are omnipresent—circulated and discarded, lingering as trash once their utility is exhausted. Many viewers read Takadiwa’s work as a symbolic act of returning this waste to the West in general and the U.S. more specifically after decades of consumer detritus flowing toward Africa. But as the artist points out, this is a narrow interpretation that only scratches the surface of his practice. While it’s true that the U.S. offloads portions of its unprocessable waste to the Global South, this phenomenon does not affect every African country equally.

Globalization has made mass-produced, imported consumer goods ubiquitous, including in Zimbabwe—homogenizing daily routines, shaping societal behaviors and often eroding indigenous traditions. “These objects are global,” Takadiwa says. “They define everyday life almost regardless of where a person is geographically located.” What varies is not the presence of these items, but the level of access, determined by social class and wealth inequality.

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When Takadiwa went to college and began studying art, Zimbabwe was in the midst of one of its most difficult economic periods and students had to be resourceful just to complete their studies. “Those who could not afford traditional art materials had to be creative, and many of us were actually searching through trash to find something, anything, we could submit for assignments,” he recalls. It became a shared experience across an entire generation of young artists. Some abandoned the practice later, but others found their artistic voice in that space of improvisation, embracing a DIY, makeshift aesthetic born from material scarcity. That necessary survivalist sensibility evolved into an artistic language, a way of making do with what was available while asserting cultural identity in the face of economic and political marginalization.

Interior view of a gallery with polished wood floors, featuring three large wall-mounted beaded artworks and a bright red column in the center.
Takadiwa’s installations, crafted from repurposed materials, offer both aesthetic beauty and poignant political commentary on consumerism, inequality and environmental degradation. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim

Today, Takadiwa works with a team, many of whom he met through those same networks of informal labor. “I’ve developed teams inside the studio and outside,” he says. “These people roam around the dumps in the open fields of Zimbabwe. The city still struggles with waste management, so trash ends up in these fields, and over the years, the dumps have only grown.” His collaborators—many former waste pickers—now engage in a more directed and creative form of labor, searching for specific materials that serve as fonts in Takadiwa’s visual code. This process not only supports his practice but also offers others a different kind of agency within the endless loop of global consumerism. He describes their work as part of a larger, symbolic reordering of value where discarded objects and the people who handle them are brought into the center of meaning.

However, it was not an easy task to secure their collaboration. “It used to be very strange for them to see me there,” Takadiwa explains. “I had to build mutual trust, even though this collaboration brought them financial benefits.” Because he was searching for very large quantities of specific items, the people he encountered initially suspected he might be reselling the objects, or worse, working with the Chinese-owned industries that, in recent years, have spread across Zimbabwe, grinding such discarded materials into recyclables for profit.

In this way, Takadiwa’s practice doesn’t just involve material recovery but also actively intersects with and reveals larger economic and geopolitical shifts underway across the African continent. As many Western companies withdrew, a new wave of Chinese industrial expansion filled the vacuum, reshaping local economies, labor structures and access to material goods.

 Two large, colorful wall-based works made from beaded and textile materials hang on opposite walls of a white-walled gallery space.
Takadiwa’s compositions are woven from materials recovered from dumping sites around Harare, as well as trash from a clothing factory. Photo: Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim.

Yet the availability of materials remains unstable, subject to seasonal cycles and broader fluctuations in production and consumption. Some objects may disappear entirely from dumps when factories shut down or supply chains shift. “If you visit the dumps, they’re always changing; even their color changes,” Takadiwa says, describing how these landscapes become both symptoms and litmus tests of larger economic patterns. In tracking the flow of discarded objects, his work maps the otherwise invisible circuits of global commerce—circuits increasingly defined by China’s economic presence across Africa.

China’s economic involvement in Africa surged in the early 2000s under the Go Out policy, when the Eastern power offered infrastructure projects—roads, railways, ports, stadiums, government buildings—in exchange for access to natural resources like oil, copper and rare earth minerals. Largely financed by concessionary loans backed by banks, particularly China Exim Bank and China Development Bank, Chinese investments in Africa’s large-scale infrastructure development enabled state-owned and private enterprises to expand into the continent and secure access to critical raw materials.

In sum, the failures of the post-colonial handover, resulting in fragile local economies and deepening debt, created the space for a new imperialism concealed under the guise of industrial partnership, where informal labor, waste and resource economies are tethered to global supply chains that rarely benefit local populations.

In Zimbabwe, these dynamics have played out with striking visibility. After the early 2000s collapse of relations with Western governments, largely due to the land reform crisis and international sanctions, China emerged as Zimbabwe’s “all-weather friend,” as Takadiwa puts it. “Zimbabwe’s economy was falling apart, so in 2003 the Mugabe government launched the Look East Policy, deepening ties with China.” Since then, China has invested over $2 billion in Zimbabwe, with key projects including the Kariba South Hydropower Expansion Project ($533 million), the expansion of the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport even a new Zimbabwean Parliament building—a $140 million “gift,” instrumental in cementing political soft power.

Chinese companies are now heavily involved in Zimbabwe’s mining sector, and the country is home to several Chinese-owned industrial parks and manufacturing hubs. Most importantly, as Takadiwa’s artistic practice makes visible through his direct competition with Chinese industries for discarded materials, Chinese-linked companies purchase vast quantities of waste and scrap—particularly e-waste such as computer parts, phones and wires, as well as plastics, metals and other electronic debris. Most of the time, these materials are collected informally by local workers and then sold to Chinese-operated factories that shred and reprocess them into raw materials, creating a parallel shadow economy with deep global ties.

 person walks past a large, irregularly shaped wall sculpture made of colorful beads, including green, gold, and white elements, hanging on a white wall.
Moffat Takadiwa Fashion Brands (d), 2025; computer and laptop keys, toothbrushes, buttons and various accessories, 69 1/2 x 55 in. Photo: Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim.

Beyond the political dimensions embedded in both the materials and the process of his work, Takadiwa’s practice embraces environmental concerns from a more holistic standpoint grounded in the ways his local culture and spirituality conceive of the relationship between human beings and between humans and their surroundings as deeply interconnected. “In African ancestral knowledge, you can’t separate the relationship between humans from environmental issues,” he explains. “For example, in our tradition, when you do something wrong to another human being, you have actually done something wrong to the environment.”

At the same time, Takadiwa’s practice also carries a ritualistic and spiritual dimension: through the acts of cleaning, redeeming, re-symbolizing and re-ritualizing, it transforms waste into witness, and into a tool for reawakening consciousness. In this process, discarded materials begin to reveal their meaning, the community asserts its agency, and the waste gains a voice. His sculptures become documents of global movement, economic contradiction, cultural erosion and postcolonial endurance.

When we speak on the phone after his return to Zimbabwe following the opening of the exhibition at Nicodim, Takadiwa and his studio were already back to work, finalizing his piece for the São Paulo Biennial, which is set to open in September with the title “Nem todo viandante anda estradas / Da humanidade como prática” (“Not All Travellers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice”). The Biennial, like Takadiwa’s own artistic and studio practice, seeks to envision, imagine and propose alternative ways of practicing humanity, drawing solutions from peripheral knowledge.

While Takadiwa is no stranger to large-scale work, his pieces are typically wall-based installations. The Biennial will mark the first time he explores a more immersive, installative dimension, creating a sculptural vehicle that visitors will be able to enter, sit inside and use as a platform for exchange and dialogue. “I’m referencing the biblical story of Noah’s ark,” he says. “It was supposed to save people and carry them to another world, as the old one disappeared underwater. In this vehicle, people are meant to enter in pairs and talk about what we use every day and how our daily actions and patterns of consumption are pushing the world toward extinction.”

The architectural scale of the piece invites visitors to engage physically and spatially, allowing them to experience different facets of the work and of the discarded materials that comprise it “Just as I like giving those materials a new life,” Takadiwa adds, “I also like giving people new opportunities to both more critically and creatively respond to the reality we’re living in.”

An abstract wall-mounted artwork made from repurposed beads, wires, and found materials. The piece features a large, gold-rimmed opening filled with dark, wavy strands, a section of pale, circular patterns, and a bundle of white thread emerging from the lower center. A small circular motif with purple and pink beading appears near the bottom left.
Moffat Takadiwa, Fashion Brands (a), 2025; computer and laptop keys, toothbrushes, buttons and various accessories, 68 x 54 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim

As tools to not only rethink but also practice a more sustainable relationship with the interconnected ecosystem of human behaviors and the natural and material world, Takadiwa conceives his art as a form of hope—especially the works he’s presenting in New York, which have been created together with his studio-community. “Hope is a big word, but also my big hope,” he says. “Because now I have a studio that’s sort of at the center of a community, and with my activity and my art, I can bring hope through different perspectives.”

Beyond his artistic practice, Takadiwa is the founder of Mbare Art Space in Harare, where he plays a pivotal role in mentoring the city’s emerging artists and has established the world’s first art center dedicated to repurposing reclaimed materials. Functioning as both an educational and working site, it offers a space where a new generation can begin practicing a more creative, regenerative approach to the cycles of production and consumption. Takadiwa has successfully built a micro-economy of art production that echoes the spirit of traditional craft collectives—yet with a distinctly global, post-consumer twist.

“With my practice, I’m trying to give hope to a community,” Takadiwa says toward the end of our exchange. “I see hope in the process of finding these materials that were meant to die, and then giving them another life. For me, this speaks to a kind of hope in humanity and hope in my own country, which seems hopeless at the moment.” Behind the seductive textures of these multilateral compositions, he’s weaving complex political and economic realities with an inherent belief in the creative capacity of humankind—not just to generate waste, but to regenerate meaning, possibility and beauty from the dumps of this civilization.

Moffat Takadiwa’s “Second Life” is on view at Nicodim Gallery through July 3, 2025.

Moffat Takadiwa Weaves Hope from Trash in the Heart of Zimbabwe