Is the Road to Hell Paved with Good Intentions?: The Nest Collective’s Return to Sender
In this blog, Ana Bilbao asks what we can learn from an artwork beyond it being good or bad or resulting in positive or negative behaviour, arguing that art can help us engage with human rights in novel ways and offer us a pathway to work and think together.
All images: The Nest Collective, Return to Sender, 2022. Installation view at Documenta 15. Courtesy The Next Collective.
Axiology (the philosophical study of value) is a much-shared approach in our disciplines, history of art and human rights. Art historians and curators are believed to have the magic wand to discern good from bad art. I assume that my colleagues, too, are expected to make distinctions between practices worth defending (good) and others worth fighting against (bad).
Arguably, this axiological way of seeing and interpreting our worlds has led to elitism on the one hand and western centrism on the other. Therefore, I am not writing about Return to Sender (2021/22) now because of its status as a good work of art. It’s not that it isn’t one. Instead, I want to focus on how this work can help us engage with human rights in novel ways. I want to speculate whether the very structure of some works of art (and not their immediate didactic power) might offer us a pathway to work and think together. What, if anything, can we learn from an artwork beyond it being good or bad or resulting in positive or negative behaviour? Can artworks sketch infrastructures for living and thinking? Can such works generate human rights languages and codes rather than merely illustrate NGO campaigns? Return to Sender (hereafter RTS) triggers these questions.
We often engage with charity on the basis of pity. Our sense of others’ suffering motivates us to help those in need. Albeit indirectly, RTS deals with charity. However, it seeks to highlight not the suffering of the other but their dignity. Rather than being affirmative or guilt-wracking, it is in nature reflexively confrontational. It is particularly provocative for us privileged people living in the West who pat ourselves on the back for charitable behaviour. In what seemed to be a win-win situation, 41% of UK citizens cleaned out their closets during the lockdown, two-thirds of which donated these clothes to charities (WRAP, 2020). RTS suggests how dystopic waste landscapes in African countries are indeed paved with charitable intentions.
RTS is an architectural intervention by The Nest Collective displayed in Documenta 15 in 2022. The Nest Collective is a multidisciplinary group founded in 2012 and based in Nairobi, Kenya. At the heart of their work is African urban and contemporary inquiry in which histories are challenged and possible futures imagined (This is The Nest). During Documenta 15, RTS was displayed at the Karlswiese, a green recreational area in front of one of Kassel’s landmarks, The Orangerie. The Karlswiese is at the heart of a 125-hectare Baroque state park called the Karlsaue. This Western European paradise temporarily encloses an electronic and textile wasteland, a permanent reality in many African countries. Laying on the grass is a black pathway flanked on both sides by black and white short rectangular bales of electronic waste. Towards the end of the track, one can see a tall structure built from metal tubes populated by smaller bales packed with mitumba – the word Kenyans use to refer to second-hand garments and textiles. Different African countries use other names for this, as this Twitter thread by Odour Oduku shows. The rectangular assembly is covered by metal warehouse roofing material held by tubular structures that cut from side to side, creating a small room. It’s not a white cube, one of the most common settings to engage with contemporary art, but a waste rectangle. Right in the middle of the room is a big screen that covers the back wall. There are benches around the room so visitors can sit and watch Return to Sender – Delivery Details (2002), the 15min. 37sec. video-work that accompanies the architectural structure.
Delivery Details is divided into segments, each of which features speakers who have engaged with issues of mitumba in one way or another. In a documentary-style interview setting, they offer their views on the societal, economic, environmental, and political tolls of mitumba imports. All speakers shared their highly informed perspectives, but unlike government reports, simple facts and statistics are mixed with stories and philosophical questions of dignity and identity. Facts include how the best second-hand clothes are picked to remain in Western countries. In contrast, the lowest quality is sent in bales to Africa: 40% of the clothes arriving in Kenya is unwearable and ends up in dumpsites. Speakers acknowledge that the industry creates work for low-skilled individuals, but it’s poorly paid. They affirm that with the rise of mitumba, 90% of the workforce of the textile industry, a job that was considered dignified, has been lost.
In view of developing their local industries, some East African countries wanted to ban second-hand clothes imports by 2019. This initiative was met with rejection and threats of severe economic sanctions by the Trump administration. The ban would cost jobs and millions of dollars in exports for the US, and waste would end up in landfills in American territory (for detailed information on this petition, click here). The rejection of this initiative shows how the Global North outsources its waste management to the Global South, justifying it to the public as charity for the poor. Speakers mention how people buy second-hand clothing because they have no other choice. This fosters a disempowered identity: one speaker asks, ‘what happens to a people who are always carrying an identity – some random identity— of someone in the Global North? … what it means to how you see yourself, what it means about how you are able to stand and present yourself in the world?... Every Eid and Christmas…every single family, regardless of where you lie economically, it’s such an important gesture to buy new clothing for our children.’ Ultimately, it is a matter of dignity. The segments end with the last speaker passionately advocating for securing African dignity beyond market dynamics. For him, that’s ‘a political question’.
These segments are interleaved with still images of fragments of a Twitter thread by Kathambi Kaaria, a Kenyan communicator, consultant, and sustainability strategist. Kaaria advocates for reducing mitumba imports and instead boosting local industries, while warning of countries such as China potentially exploiting the situation.
RTS doesn’t expose charities or target specific countries in the Global North. While containing highly articulate speeches infused with facts, the tone of the segments is conversational. Speakers don’t take the position of experts or truth-holders, but each presents their own views combining socio-political aspects and stories. The work is not an invitation to partake in denial, nor does it dissuade the viewer from engaging in charitable behaviour. It reminded me of what a colleague suggested in one of our meetings: that perhaps human rights activism is too focused on results. As it were, RTS isn’t a call for immediate action and is a far cry from guilt-wracking. The work does not try to drum up an attitude of reproach against the colonial legacies of the white saviour. Instead, all viewers are warmly hosted by an architectural structure that feels neat, dignified, and stoic, although made of waste. Does putting the other’s dignity at the forefront help prevent compassion from being weaponised to neo-colonial ends?
RTS is the kind of work that unfolds slowly, over time; the kind that keeps coming back to mind time and again. It won’t overwhelm the viewer with pleasantness or shock value, but the physical experience returns through reflective dribs and drabs. Without denying the importance of urgency and immediate action to deliver social justice, perhaps works with a slow unveiling can instigate deeper reflection. The question is whether human rights activists, practitioners – and especially beneficiaries – can afford such patience.
I would like to thank The Nest Collective for their generosity.
