At the 61st Venice Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys, Nigerian artist Victoria-Idongesit Udondian presents a deeply layered intervention that transforms discarded textiles into a powerful meditation on migration, labour, memory, and environmental violence. Invited by Kouoh as part of the International Exhibition, Udondian’s presentation extends her long-standing investigation into the global second-hand clothing industry and the systems of extraction, displacement, and circulation embedded within it.
Working across textiles, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video, and ceramics, Udondian has built a practice rooted in material histories and the social lives of objects. Born in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria in 1982, and trained in tailoring, painting, sculpture, and new genres, her work consistently interrogates the afterlives of materials—particularly textiles—and the ways they move through systems of trade, labour, and identity. Rather than approaching fabric as decorative surface, Udondian treats it as archive: something capable of carrying histories of touch, ownership, migration, aspiration, and survival.
Her Biennale project, Obroni Wawu (2019–2026), unfolds as a large-scale textile installation examining the environmental and social consequences of the global second-hand clothing trade. The phrase “Obroni Wawu,” translated from Akan as “dead white man’s clothes,” refers colloquially to used garments imported from the West into African markets. Through this title alone, the work immediately opens up questions around value, waste, and the unequal geographies of global consumption.
Installed outdoors at the Arsenale, the project draws direct inspiration from the Old Fadama landfill in Accra, Ghana, where mountains of discarded clothing accumulate and burn, producing devastating environmental consequences. The installation combines sculptural textile environments with layered sound recordings gathered from Kantamanto Market in Ghana and second-hand markets in Nigeria, alongside interviews with immigrants and migrants in New York and Accra. Through these overlapping voices and materials, the work becomes both landscape and testimony—a physical manifestation of the hidden systems underpinning fast fashion and global trade.
Importantly, Obroni Wawu is not an isolated project, but the culmination of several interconnected bodies of work developed over years between New York, Ghana, and Nigeria. The installation incorporates elements from Ofong Ufok (2019–2022), realised in collaboration with Stitch Buffalo, a refugee resettlement organisation in New York supporting immigrant women. For that project, Udondian intercepted bales of used clothing originally destined for Africa and worked collaboratively with immigrant participants to create a monumental community textile sculpture. The gesture transformed discarded garments into a collective language of labour, migration, and resilience.
The project also extends into Okrika Reclaimed (2024–2025), developed within Kantamanto Market—one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in the world. Treating the market simultaneously as site, subject, and collaborator, Udondian worked alongside women head porters known as kayayei (“she who carries the burden”), creating sculptural headpieces reflecting the realities of their labour within the informal market economy. Through this engagement, the work shifts away from abstract critique and toward embodied experience, foregrounding the people who physically carry the weight of these global systems.
Accompanying the installation is Momome, a performance activating the work through the presence of seven Black women embodying the kayayei. Wearing constructed costumes and headpieces made from reclaimed garments, the performers move collectively through the space, transforming labour into ritual gesture. Drawing from Akan and Ivorian traditions of women’s processions associated with communal cleansing, the performance becomes a meditation on burden, endurance, and transformation. Rather than presenting suffering as spectacle, Udondian stages collective movement as a space of resilience and renewal.
Africans Column had the opportunity to speak with Victoria-Idongesit Udondian about her participation in In Minor Keys, the layered narratives embedded within her materials, and how her practice engages sustainability, transformation, and the politics of global circulation.
Africans Column: Your work engages materiality through textiles, labour, and environment—how are these themes expressed here?
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: In this installation, materiality is never neutral; it carries the weight of human touch, labour, and circulation. The repurposed materials that I use, particularly secondhand garments, are embedded with histories of use, migration, and exchange. I am interested in how these materials bear witness to global systems of production, consumption, and disposal. By reworking and recontextualising them, I make visible forms of labour that are often overlooked or undervalued, while also pointing to the environmental consequences of excess and waste.
My practice engages sustainability through repurposing. Rather than producing new materials, I work with what already exists—discarded materials—and transform them into sculptural forms and installations. This transformation is not purely aesthetic; it reveals cycles of consumption and accumulation while questioning who ultimately bears the cost of these global systems.
Africans Column: How does your practice intersect with ideas of sustainability and transformation in this presentation?
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: Sustainability in my practice is not just about reuse, but about transformation—both material and conceptual. I work with repurposed materials that have already lived multiple lives, and I intervene in them through processes of unraveling, stitching, and recomposition. This act of transformation resists linear consumption and instead proposes a cyclical understanding of value. In this presentation, the work becomes a site where waste is reimagined, where what has been cast off is given new form and meaning.
My practice engages sustainability through repurposing and recontextualization. Rather than producing new materials, I work with what already exists—discarded clothing—and transform it into sculptural forms and installations. This transformation is not purely aesthetic; it reveals cycles of consumption, excess, and waste, while questioning who bears the cost of global systems of production.
Africans Column: What narratives are embedded within the materials you use?
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: The repurposed materials I use are rich with layered narratives, particularly within the context of global trade. They speak to histories of colonialism, economic imbalance, and cultural exchange, as garments move across continents from the global North to markets like Kantamanto. Each piece carries traces of its previous life—of ownership, wear, and use—while becoming part of new local economies.
Embedded within these materials are stories of labour, from garment production to informal market systems, as well as narratives of identity, displacement, aspiration, and survival. There are also quieter histories of loss and adaptation, as communities repurpose and revalue what has been discarded. My role is to draw out these overlapping narratives, allowing them to coexist within the work as both material and meaning.
Africans Column: How does your work respond to the exhibition’s emphasis on subtlety and nuance?
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: While my work engages complex and often urgent issues, I approach them through subtle textures and gestures rather than overt or didactic statements. I am interested in creating space for ambiguity and reflection, allowing meaning to unfold over time. The meditative, slow, and labour-intensive processes of hand weaving and stitching these materials together align with the exhibition’s emphasis on nuance.
These repetitive acts of making introduce a quiet rhythm that contrasts with the speed of the global systems I am addressing. The use of sound and layered materials further creates an atmosphere where meaning emerges gradually, inviting reflection rather than direct didactic interpretation.
Africans Column: How do you imagine the audience encountering your work physically and conceptually?
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian: The monumental scale of the installation confronts the viewer with its physical weight and invites movement, encouraging viewers to navigate around and through it while becoming aware of their own bodies in relation to the materials. Physically, they are surrounded by the density and accumulation of textiles, which evoke both landscape and archive, creating an immersive, tactile experience.
Conceptually, I hope the audience engages with the layers of meaning embedded in the work—the histories carried within the garments and the systems they implicate. It is an encounter that unfolds over time, prompting both an immediate sensory response and deeper reflection. Through this, viewers may begin to question the origins of these materials and their own relationship to global systems of consumption, labour, and waste.
Within the broader framework of In Minor Keys, Udondian’s contribution resonates through its ability to hold urgency without spectacle. Rather than overwhelming the viewer with direct declarations, the work operates through accumulation, texture, sound, and embodied presence. Its power emerges slowly, through repetition and proximity, revealing the invisible systems embedded within everyday materials.
What makes Obroni Wawu particularly compelling is the way it collapses distinctions between sculpture, archive, environment, and social history. The discarded garment becomes not only material, but evidence. The installation becomes not only an artwork, but a geography of circulation, labour, migration, and survival. In Venice, amid the density of global contemporary art discourse, Udondian offers something deeply human and profoundly necessary: a space where material remembers, where waste speaks, and where transformation becomes both method and resistance.
