E'KABO

Junkyard art
12/28/05, Pelu Awofeso

E K'ABO's Pelu Awofeso reports on the so-called Junkman of Africa, an eccentric Nigerian sculptor whose art (celebrated round the world) is inspired by society's discarded items.

"My installations are not expressions of what I feel," says the sculptor Dilomplizulike, widely referred to as 'Junkman from Africa', of his latest contraption curiously titled Nigeria. "They are what is." His Nigeria is burdened-a crumbling, defaced Mazda stacked inside, outside and above with firewood, corrugated aluminum sheets, umbrella, tyre and so many other materials from the dumping ground. It is art in its most startling form, a scornful critique from a man who makes no apologies for how he has chosen to express his thoughts, his lifestyle and his appearance.

Dilomplizulike, mind you, isn't saying anything new about his homeland. He has only chosen to dress an old doll in fresh, although rare, clothing-in a way only he can manage. And he wants the rest of his compatriots to pay attention. He is at home with what have become nobody's properties-the wastes of society. And having stepped aside from the rat race, he busies himself collecting these junk items to tell his own story.

"My duty is to bring back their colour and revitalise them," he says. "I see it like going into the highway and picking all the beggars and moving them to someplace to give them food, give them good clothes, build a new life for them." So why use them to describe an entire nation? "Is Nigeria not used and dumped?" he shoots back. "Being used and abandoned is not a new word for Nigeria. We abuse everything; there's loss of value; there's no sense of education; there's no sense of orientation. There's no regard for even the human life. People don't place value on anything, so it becomes a very significant factor in the historical trace or representation of the lives of the people who have used these things and left them behind."

Woods represent the oppressed of society in the sculptor's view and tens of these occupy the boot of the current installation. From the look of it, they are far from comfortable. But four (symbolic) persons sit at ease inside the car itself. It is an unmistakable reference to a daily occurrence in Lagos, where public transport vehicles (called Molue) have more passengers standing than those seated. The late Afrobeat maestro Fela Anikulapo Kuti referred to this suffering-'44 sitting, 99 standing'-in Zombie, one of his most loved songs.

Did anything inform the choice of the particular car in the installation, which took seven hours to pull to the exhibition grounds? "The way I assemble the junks is that I see them as ingredients of a soup," Dilomplizulike replies. "You decide which one you want to make. If you decide on egusi, ewedu or white soup, you look around what you have-either in the market or in the kitchen-and put it together. So the junks are ingredients of a soup. And you have seen here the perfect ingredients of this soup. I couldn't have gone for any other thing."

In 2003, Junkman showed a gathering of art lovers Listening to a Broken Tone, another work featuring firewood as the dominant objects. "The firewood represent Nigerians and Africans," he says. "I had a guitar, a broken guitar that I play in front of a huge stock of firewood. Of course, you listen forever, you won't hear anything."

Somehow, local authorities have never bothered with whatever he has had to say over these years, a disregard that angers him. He wrote critical essays, which achieved little. He would break down and weep and try to let out his bottled rage. As a sculpture lecturer at the University of Benin, mid-west Nigeria, Junkman was banished to a filthy, dilapidated building after he'd stuffed his initial office with assorted rubbish, which were so much they fell out of the room. The new place, he recalls, "was leaking and had no windows." It made him angrier. Unable to bear the anguish further, he left the institution for a Masters degree (in Art) in Britain.

"It's been over 20 years. Now maturity has made it possible for me to package my anger and throw it like a bomb without affecting myself," Dilomplizulike says in a tone of triumph. One of his recent 'bombs,' is a 17-piece installation -"Waiting for a Bus"-featured at the Africa Remix '05 Exhibitions (see E k'abo March 2005), which has traveled the world from Germany, through France, Spain, Sweden, Japan and South Africa. The work shows queuing figures in taters (materials like soiled blue jeans, yellow plastic helmet, a red hand bag and a black stiletto shoe stand out), expecting a public transport that may take eternity in arriving.

"I have had over 30 exhibitions abroad," he reveals, proud of his exploits in foreign lands. "And I have had the biggest, loudest Artist-In-Residency Awards (perhaps referring to the one supported by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Gulbenkian Foundation). And by awards, I mean some institutions don't let you apply; they find you."

Dilomplizulike keeps his real names (Dil Humphrey-Umezulike) to himself and avoids talking about his family in conversations with journalists but is quick to credit his kids with some of the things he has learned. He lives an ascetic life in a thickly vegetated suburb of Lagos; he uses no electricity ("except if I want to show some journalists or some people from abroad my films.") and sleeps on the floor, he says, "like a fowl" except when in a hotel room abroad. It's all part of a plan to stay free of life's complications. "What pleases the world does not please me," he explains. "There's nothing I have not touched. I have touched money, real money; heaps of suits and everything. It's all vanity. What you have could be a tool for what you want to do. Outside that, you don't need it."