Three individuals, sacks placed on discards or held close to their bodies, a dull dark dominating grey that blurs the view, adding a layer of illusion and strangeness: this photograph depicts the Dandora dumpsite enveloped in a noxious smoke with marabou stalks stooping over grim reek of wastes defiant to time and decay. The foreground is awash with the wastes spreading infinitely to the horizon, merging it with the sky to give a sombre view, a representation that is an excess and incomplete at the same time.
This photograph was part of research and creative process for the Orodha Oracle project which began as a response to the degrading human and environmental health after the 2019 Corona pandemic. In it, concerns for magnitude, extent and durability of discards is apparent. The birds, the individuals are part of the dumpsite ecosystem who have lived their entire lives in a state of waste-emergency and will continue to bear the brunt of pollution, if appropriate action is not taken.
The Dandora landfill which covers approximately 30 acres is the destination of about 850 tonnes of solid waste gathered daily from all parts of Nairobi city. Despite being declared completely full in 1996, dumping still continues, coupled with spontaneous combustion of pent-up methane, emitting stench and thick carbon smoke to the Dandora sky, which residents are forced to breath daily.
Over the periods, the heaps, mainly plastic residues stiffened into non-degradable sediments which cannot be consumed completely by incineration. In fact, what was to burn or rot must have. What still remains - juala, glass shards, debris, torn enamel fragments, used human hair, shreds of old fabrics etc, will still remain. The Marabou storks prey on them, turning them over and over as if to speed their decomposition.
Dandora dumpsite was established by City Council in the mid 1980s to the south-east of Nairobi. It’s sprawling over grounds once allocated to the construction of Dandora ‘’Phase 6’’, in a World Bank - Kenya government low-cost housing project. The last ‘’phase 6’’ of the project never took off instead, dumping took over that ground. Exhaustive studies of the dumpsite was published in 1998 by the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA) as part of solid waste management in Nairobi. The report cited environmental health hazards and threats of ground water pollution by a foul-smelling liquid called leachate, which most likely leaks into the nearby Nairobi river.
Orodha Objects
Working every morning, fours hours daily from Monday to Friday with a group of acrobats at the Tempo Arts Centre in Ruaraka, Nairobi, the intention was to broach the impact of plastic wastes and river pollution while involving the local community in river clean-ups activities, bamboo propagation and tree planting along the river bank. To date, over a thousand trees including bamboos have been planted at Tempo Arts Centre and along the river banks all the way to the Dandora waterfall.
Tempo Arts Centre is a rehabilitated quarry which exists as a liminal site situated in between the Nairobi river and the Dandora dumping ground functioning as a green space for the dumpsite and Lucky Summer community. The project gradually evolved into artistic explorations on bodies, plastics, river waters and the landfill. The results are; a performance piece, photographs, videos and object installations.
Orodha became an invaluable metaphor in understanding especially the object at the dumpsite, their symbolic relationship with the dumpsite community, for whom they form an extension of their environment and part of their bodies. In the rehearsals, the terms; touch and care became valuable references to how chokoras handle orodha objects with the same sensibility they touch their bodies with.
Usage of metaphors was not only to inspire new social relations and cultural forms while overlooking the impact of wastes, it was simply to expand the vocabularies with which to indulge the artistic explorations and to generate body movements materials for composition.
Orodha objects are stuff picked from the dumpsite, washed, repaired then re-introduced into the commodity cycle selling at cheaper prices to slum residents. They are the left-overs in a world obsessed with merchandising everything, where anything can be a product and a commodity. They are the deep mark we are leaving on Earth’s surface, a mark running so deep it may as well outlast us. The installations are built from orodha but not to romanticise making art from discards, idea which has been hijacked by big polluters to justify their lust for over-production of plastics, claiming that artists will recycle them into art.
People working at the dumpsite have not always been considered individuals as such but collective people hence the epithet; chokora - a tag so close to the category of orodha objects than to humans. This is particularly evident when one of them dies, the dead become part of the refuse, as faceless in death as they were in life. Anonymous and tribe-less. The dumpsite too, render them visible but in a negative way - those lacking basic human needs like housing, minimal space for privacy and toilets. Chokora is a Swahili word which loosely translates to pickers or scavengers.
Without cultivating empathy, one can never understand chokora really. It is ‘’in empathising, that we enter actively and imaginatively into other’s inner states to understand how they experience their world and how they are feeling within a context in which we care to respect and acknowledge their human dignity and our shared humanity.’’1 Deep understanding of their persona was necessary not so as to represent them but to understand how to use art’s communicative potentials in building our capacity for empathy in the project.
The Work
Out of the creative process, two versions came up; first one for site specific performances and a second version for theatre and museum spaces. The first version entailed mounting pictures, videos and objects installations at the dumpsite, along the Nairobi river banks then activating them by performing in between them. This version targeted local community. The second fit conventional linear timing replete with scenography and lighting design targeting theatre and museum audiences.
The performance is laid in a carefully scored choreography designed for both sites. Here choreography functions as that which attends to vast fields that are far apart; acrobatics, photographs, videos, and installations but can form one whole. Choreography that’s not so much about bodies but about relations, where movements does not only begin and end with the human body but extend to the different fields.
The performers listen to spaces between them, rhythm, chaos, sound of the river and birds to create succulent meeting points between them, and the environment. Watching it, the spectator is immersed into a utopian ecosystem; transported to it through acrobatic movements, layered sounds, moving images, installations and guided walk to the various sites along the river bank and the dumpsite.
The pictures and videos prepared in advance during rehearsals and in the research, depict landscape, people and objects organising time and space in a non - hierarchical manner. Non - hierarchical to challenge the anthropocentrism mentality that we humans rule the Earth and the Earth needs us. There is a lot more to Earth than to us, and biodiversity doesn’t need us much. Some photographs delve deep into the dehumanising conditions at the dumpsite to portray a world teetering beneath the impossible weight of our actions, a reality none can ignore.
Orodha Oracle are stories of resilience, environmental flaws and trauma. The project creates a space where the under-valued knowledge and efforts of the dumpsite and the riverine ecosystem can be recognised without criminalising them for encroachment and not forcing them to adapt to failed government policies. Tree planting and river restorations initiatives will go along way to ensure a better future environment for all.
The project tells stories of the underrepresented by diversifying representation to ensure plurality of voices. Including acrobats who are not always recognised for their artistic value other than being regarded as entertainers or clowns. Here, just like the dumpsite community, they are creating public awareness on vital issues of survival in this time when the future needs our full attention more than before.
Endnotes
1. Felicity Laurence, “Prologue: Revisiting the problem of empathy” in music and Empathy, eds. Elaine King and Carline Waddington, editors. Music and Empathy. London, Routledge, 2017.
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