Shenandoah Interviews Zimbabwean Artist Moffat Takadiwa

Moffat Takadiwa is a contemporary Zimbabwean artist who repurposes post-consumer waste such as bottle caps, toothbrushes, keyboard keys, and clothing buttons, and transforms them into large-scale sculptures, tapestries, and installations. Takadiwa’s work has been exhibited all over the world, and his most recent exhibit, Recoded Memories, is currently on view at the Art Museum and Galleries at Washington and Lee University from October 24, 2025 to May 31, 2026. Shenandoah’s Special Features Editor, Nadeen Kharputly, interviewed the artist to discuss how his work embodies language, narrative, colonial and postcolonial history, environmental justice, and memory.

This is the second conversation in our series, Catalysts, that profiles people whose craft—defined broadly—advances justice and equality. This is an excerpt of the full conversation, which will be published in our Spring 2026 issue in June.

Nadeen Kharputly: Because Shenandoah is a literary magazine, I've been thinking a lot about [your work in relation to] language and narrative. So many of your exhibitions center on language. You've got both solo exhibitions (Say Hello to English, Brutalized Language, Framed in Colonial Lenses) and group exhibitions that revolve around language. You're very deliberate with the language that you use, especially about the objects that you repurpose in your works, and at least for the exhibit here at Washington and Lee, you don't see words like “trash” or “garbage” anywhere in the language. How do you approach language in your work?

Moffat Takadiwa: Born after independence in Zimbabwe, I'm part of the generation that is becoming more and more conscious about language, because we use colonial language for everyday business, and to have access to education or other things, you really need to be fluent in colonial languages. My work speaks a lot about colonial residue or colonial hangover, and language is one of the things that I'm very particular about because it is one of the most important vehicles of culture.

I try to demystify or rewrite certain things. I'll give you an example: you mentioned Say Hello To English. There were a lot of demonstrations in South Africa about languages, some which happened before independence. [In 1976] a group of young students took to the streets to demonstrate against Afrikaans because they couldn't learn in their [native] languages. And a lot of young people were shot in the streets and died; [the Soweto uprising] became a huge massacre in the history of South Africa. In more recent times, young South Africans went into the streets in 2015 to demonstrate around the subject of languages again, and they created a movement called “Rhodes Must Fall,” a very popular movement about language and colonization, and against Cecil John Rhodes, who was known for pushing English as a language, and for whom my country was named.

[In Say Hello To English] I tried to connect the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement—where young people in South Africa are questioning colonial languages and colonial knowledge systems—with the belief that knowledge can be created anywhere. We are not only supposed to be on the receiving end of knowledge. Looking at language as a way in which people can frame the world, how they see the world through a language—my work speaks to how I try to see things through peripheral knowledge systems, not knowledge from the center, but what we can learn from outside the center and from peripheral communities.

NK: You’ve said, regarding your use of computer keys in your work: “I use them a lot when I speak about language. When you are displaced, language becomes one of the first vehicles to connect back to home, or a memory of it.” I love that so much, because for people who grow up in colonized and formerly colonized nations, stripping someone of their language, demanding that they learn a non-native language, is one of the most disempowering things that you can do to a person, to disconnect them from the language that they use to speak, that they dream in, that reminds them of home.

I found myself surprised by the range of objects that you use [in your exhibit here at Washington and Lee], especially the pill packets in your Objects of Influence series. You give instructions for your team to go to the landfills and to collect items that you're looking for, right? When you're repurposing and using an object in your art, you tell your team, “This is what I'm looking for, please go look for it.” But I wonder if you've had any unexpected moments in repurposing an object and giving it a second life? Are you ever surprised by the objects you use, or the objects that you look for?

MT: I actually look for surprises. In most instances, that's what I'm looking for when I look at these materials. I also enjoy connecting objects that might not have any related connectedness in them, even in terms of their scientific or chemical compositions as materials. Looking at these objects in a mass, in huge numbers, gives me that surprise, that pulse which I look for in objects. Sometimes, when my team is looking for objects, they are my first point of engagement, because I reflect on what they see. We've worked with some of the people for a long time. They bring something to me and say, “Do you know, in the dumping fields, we are beginning to see a lot of these items, or a lot of pills, for example, medical waste and things like that.” To me, these seasonal changes in the dump sites also inform me, also surprise me—like, what's happening? Why would we have tons of medical waste? Why would we have tons of perfume cans? You have these surprising materials in the dump, sometimes trivial objects, not so important that you can find them in such huge quantities, or in an economy like Zimbabwe’s. And it's difficult sometimes to even imagine how I'm going to use them, how I'm going to connect them. It becomes a big challenge, but a challenge that I enjoy.

NK: I was thinking about the process through which you work, and how your process involves many people and many stages. You have a team of about twenty to forty people that you work with, and the work involves going to landfills, foraging for objects, cleaning them, drilling holes into them, and then weaving them. It's laborious, it's physical, it's intellectual, I'm sure it's also emotional to handle materials that once belonged to other people. I'm curious what kinds of thoughts and feelings go through your mind and your body when you and your team go through all of these steps to make your pieces?

MT: The first step we take, I usually look at these materials [through the lens of]: I'm giving hope to the community, because these are forgotten materials, or rather materials thrown away to die, to decay. I always think of germination, rebirth, or giving hope to the materials, but also to society and to the people. And for us, it's looking at how we can take everyday, trivial materials that are forgotten and polish them, treat them with respect—each and every object—give that object another life, a very polished one, a different status. It gains another life, a different, stronger narrative, to be seen as an art object with an almost eternal life in a museum. So we look at objects with the perspective that we are actually empowering them, and we can actually empower ourselves and our community.

There's another facet to this where I always look at certain resources and think, or assume, that they come from Africa. I know it's not true for all resources, but most resources come from African land and soil. And we repeat this process by mining these objects that have returned to this land to die. We take them back and find a way of returning them to the West, to the East. And in return, maybe we get money, which I plant back into the communities that were robbed. So I create layers of cycles of how we treat the objects.

NK: How does that collective work shape your vision? When you have so many people working on your pieces, and different voices, perspectives, how does that impact your own vision?

MT: Even from the first stages of the work, when we are collecting materials, I respect the opinions and the assumptions coming from the people who are in the dumping grounds. I listen to my group, to their reflections on these materials. Some of the materials I've defined as materials that represent leisure. But if you look at them, they're just ordinary, say, dishwashing liquid bottle caps. My team would say, “You only find [dishwashing liquid] in a rich person's house.” I’d ask why, and they would say, “When we were young, we could only use bath soap for everything. You'd divide it, cut it for washing, for dishes. But when you have someone using a specialized soap for dishes only, it's for leisure.” And to me, those objects will represent that [difference]. So I take all these things and build certain sides of the narrative based on what my group thinks.

NK: That's really cool, especially since I know that you've talked [elsewhere] about when you were growing up, your father had a hardware supply store, and that you had grown up seeing all of these brands from a very early age, and being fascinated by brand and packaging. For you to hear these kinds of comments, it sounds like it would revolutionize your perspective of what a brand means, or what a household object means from one person to another.

MT: Yes, exactly, exactly. There are a lot of changes that happened since I was young in Zimbabwe with the economic situation, and they’re reflected in the supermarket, because at a certain point, when you walk in, the shelves [could be] empty, and everything is now in the streets because of informal trades; people would go to Zambia, to South Africa, smuggle everyday grocery goods into the country, and start to create their own informal markets outside in the streets. The streets become more loud, the sonic [character] of the city shifts when people are selling, with the performative part of selling, and the supermarket becomes dry. So everyday products carry the Zimbabwean story, the resilience, and other layers.

NK: The thing that I love so much about your pieces is that you're constantly challenging what our assumption of the everyday is, or what it should be, and elevating it, or getting us to ask, “Is this something that is everyday for everybody?”

This interview, and this excerpt in particular, have been edited for length and clarity.