Echoes of the Landfill: Turning Ghana’s Plastic Waste into Art
ECHOES OF THE LANDFILL
Art from the Margins of Environment and Economy
Curatorial Statement by Beatrice Bee Arthur
Echoes of the Landfill is not another art exhibition. It is a radical reclamation where plastic waste is reimagined as both medium and living testimony to our callous disregard for the environment. A collaborative effort by the Museum of Science and Technology (MST) and ArtfullyYours, Bee Arthur Creative Productions for World Environment Day 2025, this exhibition convenes six Ghanaian eco-conscious artists—Obed Addo, Beatrice Bee Arthur, Essilfie Banton, Andrea Ghia, and Salim—who excavate the hidden politics within discarded plastic: narratives of colonial residues, neoliberal excess, and quiet acts of African resilience.
Landfills are the unmarked graves of globalisation. Here, Accra’s streets and shorelines become archives of abandonment—water sachets like shed skin, flip-flops as fossilised footprints, toy limbs tangled with fishing nets. These are not inert objects but silent accusers, materialising the violence of an economy that treats both people and land as disposable.
The artists in this exhibition do not recycle—they resurrect trash. Through sculpture, installation, painting, poetry, and photography, they force plastic to confess: as a relic of extractivism, a marker of climate injustice, and paradoxically, a medium for African futurity. Indigenous philosophies of circularity collide with the toxic immortality of synthetic materials, asking: What does it mean to "dispose" when there is no "away?"
Without institutional funding, this project embodies its own thesis: resourcefulness as resistance. The artists’ grassroots mobilisation mirrors the informal economies that already transform waste into worth across Africa. Echoes of the Landfill is thus both mirror and megaphone—refusing the neoliberal spectacle of sustainability to center community-led epistemologies.
This is NOT an exhibition about waste. It is an intervention in time. A demand to rewrite the lexicon of value: that a bag is not "single-use" but a generational artifact; that those who scavenge are archivists of the Anthropocene.
ARTISTS
Obed Addo
"My work is about dignity—finding it in discarded things, and in ourselves."
Beatrice Bee Arthur
"This exhibition is the toxic truth where plastics and capitalists lie."
Salim
"When I sculpt from trash, I think of ancestors. Would they forgive us?"
Andrea Ghia
"In painting about plastic pollution, I am confronting the ability of permanence to outlive memory."
Essilfie Banton
"Each artwork I make is a conversation with discarded materials. I want the viewer to see the soul of what we discard."
Nii Noi Candos
---“We are not just picking up plastic—we are picking up the pieces of a broken system. Every salvaged fragment is a challenge to the world that discarded it.”
Data Point: Ghana generates 1.1 million tons of plastic waste annually—less than 2% is recycled.
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