recycling

On my recent trip to Kinshasa I was invited to "NDAKU YA - LA VIE EST BELLE" where I found kind spirits roaming the space in the form of suits and masks. They formed spontaneously while people were cleaning the city and they celebrate there existance by dancing in the city sometimes. To understand how they came to live you have to understand that nobody wanted to create them. They formed from the dust and dirt that was collected with good intentions. The byproduct from good intentions became art.

suits made from discarded platic bottles, UTP cable and broken smartphone screens surrounded by masks

I took some pictures and collected some sounds while I was there. Looking for a common language, thinking about a visual statement and way to join the good into the intensions, I set out to collect some of the many waste on the ground in Kinshasa and turn it into a mask.

masks photographed troughout ndaku ya, with background removed

Coming from me the form factor was already decided. An intro to the brainsyncmod was quickly on the way... I got an old Prada pair of glasses with only one glass, bumped into a cnc machine in the middle of Kinshasa, where they drilled a hole into the remaining glass and attached some LEDs with wire and plastics wrappers to secure the parts in place. The creation of the glasses were a journey of there own, leading to new connections, but sharing them was actually delivering a new experience... some more info on the mask itself