Victoria-Idongesit Udondian confronts the complex dynamics of the second-hand clothing market in Africa in an installation that consolidates two bodies of work. One, Ofong Ufok, uses second-hand clothing – the residue of consumption – to illuminate the exploited material-labour nexus in the Global North. Made in collaboration with immigrant communities, this work symbolically re-centres their often-invisible labour. The other, Okrika Reclaimed, focuses on the environmental and cultural trauma inflicted by waste colonialism in Ghana, repositioning the Global South from a passive recipient to an active site of resistance.
Under the combined title Obroni Wawu – “dead white man’s clothes” – the works map the brutal ecological and social costs embedded within Western consumerism. The piece includes of West African used-goods markets with testimonials by both diasporic and migrant collaborators in the project, thus forging an embodied link between the site of disposal and the human agents of its processing. A performance deploys the bodies of seven Black women who labour in Ghana’s markets, revealing the immense burden carried by those disproportionately subjected to the global waste economy. By invoking ritual traditions of communal cleansing, the performance transforms a site of collective suffering into a space for ritualised resilience and conceptual renewal against global forces of systemic dispossession.
—Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
