APRIL, 2024
VOL. 2404
By Deutsche Welle Kenyan artist Kioko Mwitiki’s life-sized scrap metal sculptures won him global acclaim. He tells DW about his art's impact, scavenging and environmental challenges facing Africa as it becomes the 'factory of the world.' DW: Growing up in Kenya, you were expelled from your fine art course in the 1980s after getting caught up in student political demonstrations - how did you go on to get involved in environmentally-minded art? I started working in a milk churn factory as an apprentice welder and I wasn't a very good welder then so I would spend a lot of time trying to put little pieces of junk together just to perfect my welding. What I was welding, I would not have considered that as art because it was a way of making my work perfect. So one time, a white farmer came by and was looking to buy milk cans for his dairy farm, and he found where I had a whole bunch of stuff I had welded together. He spotted something that looked interesting and he came into the factory and asked, 'Who is doing this?' and they found me and asked me, 'That stuff, is that for sale?' I said, 'Yeah it’s for sale, you can buy it,' and he asked me to do more of that kind of stuff, and I said of course! I consider myself an accidental recycling artist. I made a decision to recycle more and also raise the awareness of Kenyans that this stuff can actually be recycled and made into something nice that people would like to have in their gardens. I realized that I was impacting the environment where I was, as I was picking up all the junk in the yard and converting it into something and people started seeing that all this junk can be recycled and you can clean up the environment at the same time.
Kioko Mwitiki is a pioneer of junk art and best known for his life-size sculptures
How do you find your materials? For a long time I was a scavenger, sometimes driving in my little car and picking up stuff on the side of the road, very much like a junk collector of sorts. The stuff you collect in different places ends up making very unique pieces. I have pieces with junk from all over the world, from Japan, from China, from America, so it's interesting that all this junk somehow in a way gets dumped in Africa. Africa is becoming the new factory of the world but there are also challenges of how to deal with all this excess dumping from other countries that are opening up factories up here. We don't have the right mentality to recycle the stuff. They need to be policed over what kind of waste they are churning out and how we regulate that kind of waste. Right now, there's a huge appetite for growth, there's lots of companies coming in. I think this bigger mindset of recycling is very important, especially in Africa.
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