The name Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku is currently a hot topic in African art circles. He is someone who has played a key role in bringing global attention to both his own name in the world of art and the idea of ‘Waste Colonialism,’ which straddles the edge of fabric and engages with Western worlds. After beginning his career as a civil engineer, Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku later applied his knowledge of that domain to his artistic endeavours. In his home country of Ghana, Aggrey Tieku has discovered a novel approach to increase awareness of textile waste. As part of a decades-long effort, hundreds of worn clothes items from places all over the world are sewn together to create his ever-expanding displays.
The artist’s grandmother was someone who collected clothes. That inspiration led the artist to decide he could depict the conditions of his own country, where Western clothes were arriving, by using those clothes.
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku conducted research on recycling and repurposing discarded fabric in construction, which sparked his interest in textile waste and an artistic investigation into the histories ingrained in items at the end of their life cycle. He creates striking compositions that capture the conflict between industrialisation, cultural appropriation, and the changing definition of fashion as individual and societal identity through the dyeing, layering, and reshaping of textiles.
As part of the interview series, a conversation with artists, Abirpothi, featuring Ghana artist Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku.
Q: You have a background in civil engineering while working as a full-time artist. Is that helping you to assemble massive, weighty textile installations? How do the analytical, structural requirements of engineering skills influence your fluid, soul-driven decisions?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: Engineering and art have never existed as separate worlds for me. They are simply different ways of understanding relationships.
I was trained as a civil engineer, but both engineering and art have become methods of research through which I investigate the relationships between materials, people, and the systems they inhabit. Engineering implores me to look beyond individual components and understand how structures stand—how materials behave under pressure, how forces interact, and how seemingly unrelated elements depend on one another. That way of thinking has stayed with me, but instead of applying it only to buildings or infrastructure, I now apply it to materials, landscapes, and the social and ecological systems that shape our lives.
For example, when I’m building an installation from discarded textiles, I’m not only composing a visual work. I’m thinking about weight, tension, balance, compression, and structural integrity, but I’m also thinking about the invisible systems those materials have travelled through. Every garment carries a history of production, consumption, migration, and disposal. My role is to understand how those individual stories can be brought together into a coherent whole. At the same time, engineering cannot answer every question. It can explain how something stands, but not always why it matters. Art allows me to explore memory, emotion, spirituality, and the human experience in ways that engineering alone cannot. It gives space for ambiguity, intuition, and imagination.
For me, the two practices are complementary. Engineering gives me the discipline to build complex ideas with precision, while art gives me the freedom to ask questions that don’t have fixed answers. Together, they have shaped the way I think about materials—not simply as physical objects, but as participants in larger ecological, cultural, and social systems. Ultimately, whether I’m designing a structure or creating an installation, I’m interested in the same fundamental question: how do individual parts come together to create something capable of carrying meaning, memory, and reimagined futures?
Q: Is that your grandma’s passion, collecting fabric, your major source of inspiration for the ongoing projects? How does the reality of the nameless, stripped-identity fast-fashion garbage you harvest now contrast with her heritage of considering textiles as emblems of cultural pride and identity?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: My grandmother fundamentally changed the way I see textiles. As a queen mother, she was a custodian of cultural traditions, and the textiles she collected were never just fabrics. They carried history, marked significant moments in people’s lives, reflected social identity, and connected generations. Growing up around her, I learned very early that textiles could hold memory. They weren’t passive objects; they were living archives of culture and human experience.
Today, I work with discarded second-hand clothing that has travelled through global systems of production, consumption, and disposal before arriving in Ghana. At first glance, these garments appear anonymous. They’ve been separated from the people who wore them and stripped of the personal stories they once carried, but I don’t believe those histories disappear. What interests me is that even when a garment is discarded, it continues to bear witness to the systems that produced it. It carries traces of labour, movement, aspiration, commerce, and environmental consequence. In that sense, the textile’s identity hasn’t vanished—it has changed. It no longer speaks only about an individual life; it speaks about the collective realities of the world we’ve built.
My grandmother taught me to see textiles as cultural objects. My practice has expanded that understanding by asking what textiles reveal when they move beyond the body and become part of landscapes, ecosystems, and global economies. In many ways, my work reconnects those two realities. I want to restore our ability to look at textiles not simply as commodities with a short lifespan, but as materials that continue to evolve and carry meaning long after we’ve decided they have lost their value.
I often think that the greatest difference between my grandmother’s generation and ours is not the textiles themselves, but the way we have learned to value them. She understood that cloth could preserve memory. Today, I work with materials that society has declared disposable, yet they continue to preserve memories of a different kind—memories of global trade, overproduction, environmental transformation, and our shared responsibility for the worlds we create.
Q: When did you recognise that this material- textile waste- needs to be transformed from an industrial solution to a visual canvas?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: I think there wasn’t a single defining moment. It was a gradual shift in the kinds of questions I found myself asking. When I first began working with discarded textiles, my focus was primarily on material innovation. As a civil engineer, I was researching how textile waste could be transformed into durable construction materials. I was interested in performance, strength, and the possibility of building material ecologies around circular construction. Those questions remain important to me, and that research continues today. But the more time I spent handling these materials, the more I realised they carried conversations that engineering alone couldn’t address.
The idea of a garment striding through lifetimes greatly impresses me. Someone had chosen it, worn it, cared for it, and eventually let it go. It had travelled across continents before arriving in Ghana, where it became part of a much larger story about global trade, overproduction, and environmental change. These textiles weren’t simply raw materials; they were witnesses to human behaviour and the systems we have created. That was the turning point.
By transforming them only into building blocks, I would solve one problem while overlooking the other. The material itself was asking to be seen before it was repurposed. It was asking us to pause and reflect on the histories it carried and the landscapes it was helping to reshape. Art gave me that space by allowing me to work with the material without immediately resolving it into a product. Instead of asking, “What can this become?” I also began asking, “What does this already know?” and “What can it reveal about the world we live in?”
Interestingly, I don’t see these two directions as separate. The artistic practice and the engineering research continue to inform one another. One investigates the material’s emotional, cultural, and ecological dimensions; the other explores its practical potential within more sustainable construction systems. Together, they form a continuous loop between imagination and application, reflection and innovation. Ultimately, I didn’t abandon one path for the other. I realised that the material was expansive enough to hold both.
Q: How can you actually listen to a piece of fabric while you are handling 1,000 kg of discarded clothing? What must a textile “say” in order for you to choose it?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: For me, “listening” is more of an act of paying attention and that emerges from allowing the material to change my perception before I ask it to change its form. Usually, when I’m standing in front of a mountain of discarded clothing, I’m not looking for the most beautiful garment or the most colourful fabric. I’m mostly paying attention to marks of time, how it has been worn, how it carries tension, weight, stains, tears, repairs, or fading. These are not imperfections to me; they are traces of lived experience.
Every textile arrives with a history I can never fully know, but I can see evidence of that history. The worn elbow of a jacket, a carefully repaired seam, a faded collar—these details remind me that someone once lived with this material. They tell me that the garment has travelled through time, through places, and through different hands before arriving in my studio. That is what I mean by listening.
I realised that every time I arrive with a fixed idea, the material pushes back, because textiles always have a profound sense of identity, and I think some of my strongest works happened because I stopped trying to control the outcome. and allow unexpected relationships to emerge. Sometimes a fabric carries a particular weight or texture that changes the direction of a work. Sometimes, when two materials are placed together, they begin to create a visual conversation I hadn’t anticipated. So my goal is not to dominate the material but to enter into a kind of dialogue with it.
Working with more than a thousand kilograms of discarded textiles has taught me something important: no two garments carry exactly the same story. At the same time, when thousands of them come together, they begin to speak about something much larger than individual lives. They reveal systems of production, consumption, migration, and environmental transformation. In that sense, I don’t select textiles because they tell me a single story. I select them because they hold the potential to reveal many stories at once. My responsibility is to create the conditions in which those stories can be seen, felt, and contemplated by others.
Q: How do the physical characteristics of your material—like the particular denim fades utilised in The Sky Sings Over Paris—determine a piece’s structural limitations or vulnerability?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: That’s a beautiful way of putting it, but I think there’s one important difference. I don’t just use textiles as paint—they’re also the surface, the texture, and the work’s history. Every decision begins with the material itself. Take, for example, The Sky Sings Over Paris. I wasn’t trying to reproduce the sky’s colour with blue fabric. I was searching for textiles that had already been transformed by life. The faded denim wasn’t interesting because it was blue; it was interesting because time had already painted it. The fading, the wear, the softened fibres—those qualities couldn’t be manufactured in the studio.
They were evidence of a life already lived. When I work with textiles, I’m constantly responding to their physical behaviour. Some fabrics absorb pigment differently. Some compress more densely. Others resist being folded or stitched together. A tear, a frayed edge, or a worn patch might completely change the direction of a composition. Instead of correcting those qualities, I often follow them. That’s very different from painting with oils or acrylics, where the artist has almost complete control over the medium. My materials have their own history and their own behaviour.
They set certain boundaries, and I’ve learned not to see those boundaries as limitations but as collaborators in the making of the work. I think that’s where the work’s vulnerability comes from. The textiles already carry signs of use, care, movement, and time. When they’re brought together, they don’t lose those histories—they accumulate them. My role is to create the conditions where those accumulated traces can become visible. So in many ways, I’m not painting with textiles. I’m composing through them.
Q: Can you please explain the Kantamanto Market beyond being a simple sourcing hub for you? How has the intense energy, resourcefulness, and “textile redemption” culture of the market’s local collectors and tailors reshaped your own visual language?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: Kantamanto completely changed the way I think about materials. Most people see it as a second-hand clothing market. I see it as one of the most sophisticated ecosystems of repair, adaptation, and material intelligence that I’ve ever encountered. When you spend time there, you realise that almost nothing is treated as disposable. Every garment is examined. It might be washed, repaired, altered, resized, redesigned, or taken apart so that different components can be used elsewhere. There’s an incredible culture of ingenuity driven not by excess, but by necessity. Watching that process made me realise that value is never fixed. A garment that one person considers finished can become the beginning of something entirely new in someone else’s hands. That way of thinking has profoundly influenced my visual language. Rather than treating textiles as uniform pieces of material, I began to see them as individual lives entering into new relationships. The layering, compression, stitching, and accumulation in my work are all informed by what I observed in Kantamanto. My compositions don’t seek perfection or uniformity. They embrace complexity because that’s how the market itself functions—thousands of different histories constantly intersecting, separating, and coming together again.
What has stayed with me most, though, is the people. The collectors, traders, porters, tailors, and repairers possess an extraordinary understanding of textiles. Many of them can assess a garment’s quality, durability, and future potential within seconds. That’s a form of knowledge rarely recognised, yet incredibly sophisticated. Spending time with them taught me that sustainability isn’t only about new technologies or new materials. Sometimes it’s about paying closer attention to the knowledge that already exists.
In many ways, my practice is in conversation with that culture. I don’t see myself as rescuing discarded textiles. The people of Kantamanto have been extending the lives of these materials long before I arrived. My work begins where many of those journeys end. It asks what else these materials can reveal after passing through one of the world’s most remarkable systems of repair and reuse.
Q: How can you explain the phrase “Waste Colonialism”? What do you always convey about the power dynamics inherent in the 14–15 million garments that flood Accra every week through your artwork?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: The term “waste colonialism ” isn’t about assigning guilt to one country or another. It’s about drawing attention to the unequal systems through which materials, value, and environmental burdens move around the world. Every week, millions of garments arrive in Accra. Many are wearable and continue to serve communities, supporting livelihoods and making clothing accessible. That is an important part of the story, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. But another part of the story is that a significant volume of those garments cannot be resold because they’re damaged, poor in quality, or simply exceed what the market can absorb. Those materials eventually accumulate in drains, beaches, informal dumpsites, and the ocean. What interests me is what happens after that.
The question is no longer about fashion; it’s about geography. It’s about how global systems of consumption are reshaping local landscapes. Along parts of Accra’s coastline, textiles now meet the ocean where sand once did. That image has stayed with me because it reveals that what we throw away doesn’t disappear—it simply arrives somewhere else and becomes part of someone else’s environment. Through my work, I’m trying to make those obscure relationships tangible.
I’m constantly asking who benefits from systems built on constant production and disposal, and who is left to manage their consequences. But I’m equally interested in the extraordinary ingenuity of the communities that respond to those conditions every day. In places like Kantamanto, people repair, redesign, resell, and extend the lives of garments in remarkable ways. Their knowledge challenges the assumption that value is created only at the point of manufacture. Often, it is recreated through care, skill, and adaptation. So when I speak about waste colonialism, I’m not only talking about the movement of discarded clothing. I’m talking about the movement of responsibility. Who gets to consume? Who gets to discard? Who is expected to absorb the environmental costs? Those are questions about power, but they’re also questions about ethics and our shared responsibility within an interconnected world. Ultimately, my work isn’t interested in condemning people. It’s interested in revealing the systems we’ve collectively built and asking whether we have the imagination to build different ones.
Q: How does your work directly challenge overconsumption? How do you ensure that spectators from affluent economies who interact with your art see it? Do you think the vivid, lovely colours actually convey the human and environmental costs?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: I don’t think art changes people by making them feel guilty. I think it changes people by making them look differently. One reason my work is visually rich is that I want people to come close. The colour, the texture, and the scale create an initial attraction. But once they’re standing in front of the work, I hope they begin to realise that what they’re looking at isn’t paint or an invented surface—it’s thousands of fragments of discarded clothing that have lived many lives before arriving there.
My work asks the viewer to spend time with materials they would normally overlook or throw away. It slows down an encounter that is usually very fast. We live in a culture of constant consumption, where objects are designed to move quickly through our lives. My work asks the opposite: What happens if we stop and really look at what we’ve discarded?
When I say that no one should suffer because of another person’s greed, I’m not pointing a finger at individuals. Overconsumption is not simply the result of personal choices; it’s embedded in economic systems, production patterns, marketing practices, and global trade. We all participate in those systems in different ways. My role as an artist isn’t to provide answers or assign blame. It’s to make those relationships visible. If someone leaves my exhibition thinking differently about the life of a garment, about where it came from, where it might go after they discard it, or about the unseen people and places connected to that journey, then the work has already begun to do something meaningful. Ultimately, I believe art creates empathy before it creates action. It reminds us that our lives are connected in ways we often don’t see. Once we understand those connections, the possibility of acting more responsibly becomes much more real.
Q: Why do you point out that neocolonialism’s legacy targets pride, culture, and self-image in addition to the ecological catastrophe? How can you physically dismantle such ingrained colonial views through your practice of dying, slicing, and recreating Western fast-fashion brands?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: I don’t think my work is about rejecting Western fashion or demonising particular brands. It’s about asking what happens to identity when clothing is separated from the people, cultures, and places it once belonged to. By the time many of these garments arrive in Ghana, they’ve already completed one life elsewhere. They’ve moved through systems of production, consumption, donation, and global trade before entering entirely new cultural and economic contexts. I’m fascinated by that journey because it reveals how objects continue to accumulate meaning long after they’ve left the body. When I dye or compress, stitch, and reconstruct these textiles, I’m not trying to erase their previous identities. I’m acknowledging that they’ve entered another chapter. The transformation is less about destruction and more about translation. For me, the deeper question is about value.
How does a garment move from being desirable in one part of the world to being discarded, shipped across continents, repaired, resold, and eventually becoming part of a beach, a landfill, or an artwork? That journey tells us something about the systems we’ve created and about the unequal ways in which value is assigned. There is also a cultural dimension. Clothing has always been one of the ways we express who we are. Growing up, my grandmother taught me that textiles could embody history, dignity, and identity. When millions of second-hand garments arrive every week, they inevitably influence local economies, aesthetics, and even our relationship with our own textile traditions.
My work doesn’t argue that cultures are simply erased, but it does ask how they are reshaped by these constant flows of material. By reconstructing these garments, I’m trying to create a space where those questions become visible. The work isn’t asking viewers to reject one culture in favour of another. It’s asking us to reconsider the systems through which materials circulate and to reflect on what those movements reveal about power, memory, and responsibility. Ultimately, I’m interested in whether materials can recover another kind of value—not economic value, but cultural, ecological, and human value. That transformation is at the heart of my practice.
Q: How do you envision this project changing as it collects messages and memories across countries, and why did you choose such a vast, lifetime timeline?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: I don’t believe healing has a timestamp. When I began imagining HOW TO HEAL A B-R-O-K-E-N WORLD, I realised that I wasn’t making a single exhibition or even a series of artworks. I was beginning a lifelong conversation about the relationship between people, materials, and the environments we shape together. I wanted the title to be a question rather than a declaration. It doesn’t suggest that I know how to heal a broken world. It reflects a commitment to keep asking what healing might look like, knowing that the answer will continue to evolve as the world changes. I chose a long timeline because the systems I’m investigating didn’t emerge overnight.
The environmental challenges we face today are the result of centuries of industrialisation, extraction, trade, and consumption. It would be unrealistic to imagine that art could resolve those complexities within a few years. What art can do is create spaces for reflection, dialogue, imagination, and collective responsibility over time. That’s why the project is designed to travel.
Every place it visits brings a different perspective. A textile carries one meaning in Accra, another in Paris, another in Chemnitz, another in Los Angeles. Each community adds its own experiences, memories, and questions. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, I want the project to remain open—to grow through the people, places, and conversations it encounters. I often describe it as a living archive- one that gathers relationships. Every installation, every intervention, every collaboration becomes another layer in a much larger story about how materials connect us across cultures, economies, and ecosystems. So I don’t see the next four decades as a countdown towards a finished work. I see them as an opportunity to keep learning. If the project remains open to new voices, new knowledge, and new ways of thinking, then it will continue to grow long after any single exhibition has ended.
Q: How has the 2025 Ellipse Prize with the theme “Butterfly Effect” given you a significant platform at the Paris AKAA show? How do you envision the minor, isolated actions of garment disposal in Europe having far-reaching, chaotic repercussions back home in Ghana?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: Winning the Ellipse Prize was a significant moment for me and for my practice. The theme “Butterfly Effect ” felt particularly meaningful because that idea has always resonated with my practice. It reminds us that our actions rarely end where we think they do. They continue travelling through people, places, and ecosystems, often in ways we never witness. When someone places a garment into a donation bin in Europe, it’s often an act of generosity. Most people genuinely believe they’re extending the life of that clothing, and in many cases, they are. Many garments find a second life and continue to serve communities around the world, but it doesn’t end there.
The global volume of clothing being produced today far exceeds what any secondary market can absorb. As a result, some of those garments eventually become part of environmental systems they were never intended to enter. In Accra, I’ve stood on coastlines where discarded textiles now meet the ocean, where sand once did. For me, that’s one of the clearest illustrations of the butterfly effect—not because one person’s decision caused it, but because millions of small decisions, combined with systems of overproduction and global trade, accumulate into something far larger than any individual intended. What interests me is how invisible those connections often are. A person in Paris may never see the shoreline in Accra. Someone buying a new garment may never meet the traders in Kantamanto who work tirelessly to repair, sort, and extend the lives of clothing. Yet they’re connected through the same material.
My work tries to make those invisible relationships visible. It asks us to recognise that materials don’t simply disappear when we let them go. They continue moving through the world, shaping landscapes, livelihoods, and ecosystems long after we’ve forgotten them. The butterfly effect, for me, is ultimately about responsibility—but it’s also about possibility. If our individual actions, multiplied through global systems, can contribute to ecological challenges, then our collective capacity for care, innovation, and imagination can also create positive change. That’s where I choose to place my hope.
Q: What did you learn about the modern memory, way of life, and identity of the Parisians at this precise moment from those particular textiles?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: One of the things I learned very quickly was that the garments themselves don’t tell me who the people of Paris are. They remind me that every city is made up of countless individual lives, each with its own stories, habits, aspirations, and memories. What fascinated me wasn’t the identity of a particular person, but the extraordinary scale of material movement.
Emmaüs collects clothing that people have deliberately let go of. In that moment, those garments are no longer simply personal possessions—they begin another journey. Some are repaired, some are resold, some are recycled, and some continue travelling across borders and continents. I became interested in that transition, in the moment when something deeply personal becomes part of a much larger global story. Working with those textiles in Paris made me realise they carried two kinds of memory at once.
The first was intimate. Every crease, every repair, every faded area suggested that someone had lived with that garment. Those traces reminded me that clothing accompanies us through ordinary moments that often go unnoticed.
The second memory was collective. Once those garments entered the global circulation of second-hand clothing, they also became evidence of contemporary systems of production, consumption, generosity, redistribution, and disposal. They stopped speaking only about individual lives and began speaking about the society that produced them.
What moved me most was the fact that these garments were not so different from the textiles I work with in Ghana. Before they arrived in Accra’s post-consumer textile stream, they began in places like Paris. Standing in front of them, I wasn’t looking at “French clothing.” I was looking at a shared material language that connects people across continents, even if we never meet. That’s why I don’t see the Paris presentation as being about France alone. It was about making the invisible journeys connecting Paris and Accra visible through the lives of materials. The clothing became a bridge between two places that are often discussed separately but are deeply connected through the global circulation of textiles. For me, that was perhaps the most important revelation: these garments weren’t telling me who Parisians are. They were reminding me that the things we discard continue to participate in other people’s lives, other economies, and other landscapes long after they’ve left our own.
Q: What are you going to create in a floating garden as your next piece? What are you offering the world as an artist and an engineer by turning a site of unsuccessful industrial dredging into a transient area of hope?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: Firstly, I think it’s important to understand that Bridge over Troubled Water is not pretending to solve the ecological crisis of the Korle Lagoon. Through engineering, we know that environmental restoration requires science, policy, infrastructure, and long-term investment. Art cannot replace these things. So I’m not proposing an engineering solution. I’m proposing something equally necessary: a shift in imagination.
Korle Lagoon has become a symbol of environmental failure. For decades, it has been discussed through statistics, reports, dredging projects, and pollution levels. Those conversations are essential, but they rarely change how people emotionally relate to this site. As an artist, I’m interested in whether we can transform not only the landscape but also our relationship to it. The floating textile intervention is temporary by design. It acknowledges that healing is a process rather than a finished condition. The garden growing from the work becomes a living gesture. It suggests that even in places we have almost abandoned, life still possesses an extraordinary capacity to return if we create the conditions for it.
I think that’s the proposal I’m making. Not that art can repair ecosystems on its own, but that art can help societies imagine repair before they are willing to invest in it. The bridge I’m proposing isn’t the only one that crosses water. It’s a bridge between environmental science and culture, between policy and public emotion, between ecological grief and collective responsibility.
Ultimately, Bridge over Troubled Water asks a simple question: Can hope itself become a form of infrastructure? Because if we can no longer imagine damaged places as capable of renewal, we will eventually stop trying to restore them altogether. For me, the installation is not a monument to pollution. It is an invitation to believe that repair begins long before an ecosystem has fully recovered. It begins the moment a society decides that a place is still worth caring for.
Q: How will your upcoming multidisciplinary work, which combines abstraction, painting, and sculpture, encourage audiences to dismantle the inflexible structures that have supported global society?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: I think one of the greatest misconceptions of our time is that the systems we’ve built are fixed. We often speak about economies, borders, cities, and even our relationship with nature, as though they are permanent structures. But when you look closely, they’re constantly changing. Materials move. Landscapes change. Cultures evolve. The world is far more fluid than we often imagine.
That’s the space my work is interested in. Whether I’m working through painterly forms, sculpture, installation, or large-scale interventions, I’m ultimately asking people to reconsider the relationships they take for granted. I’m interested in the spaces where categories begin to dissolve—where a garment becomes a landscape, where waste becomes an archive, where a shoreline becomes a record of global consumption. As my practice evolves, I think the boundaries between disciplines will become less important. I’m increasingly interested in bringing together artistic practice, engineering, material research, ecological thinking, and public participation—not because I want to blur disciplines for their own sake, but because the challenges we’re facing don’t belong to one discipline alone. The questions I’m asking are too complex to be answered by art, science, or engineering alone. They require conversation between all of them. That’s why I’m developing projects like the Material Ecologies Lab and the Texcrete Research Initiative. I see places where making, experimentation, research, and dialogue can coexist. It’s an acknowledgement that knowledge doesn’t move in a straight line. It grows through exchange, through testing ideas, and through remaining open to unexpected outcomes.
If I hope viewers take anything away from my work, it’s not that they leave with my answers. I hope they leave with different questions. Perhaps they begin to look at a discarded garment differently. Perhaps they see a coastline differently. Perhaps they begin to notice the hidden journeys of the materials that surround them every day. For me, that’s where change begins—not in certainty, but in attention. Once we begin paying closer attention to the materials that shape our lives, we also begin paying closer attention to one another and to the environments we share.
Q: How will you determine whether your art has succeeded in mending a broken world if you refuse to identify your future course?
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku: What I hope to do is contribute to the practice of healing. I always hold some sort of restraint when it comes to labels—not because I reject them, but because they can create the illusion that something is complete. Once we believe we’ve fully defined an idea, we sometimes stop listening to what it might still become. My practice has taught me the opposite. The most meaningful work often begins where certainty ends. The same can be said of healing. Mostly, we speak about healing as though it’s a destination—as though one day the world will simply become “fixed.” But when I look at nature, that’s not how healing works. A forest is constantly regenerating. Rivers reshape their courses. The human body is always repairing itself. Healing is a continuous process of adaptation, care, and renewal, and my project functions in that sense.
HOW TO HEAL A B-R-O-K-E-N WORLD was never conceived as a project with a final answer. I think it’s more of an invitation to remain in constant dialogue with the world as it changes.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
