A Language for the Future: Shenandoah interviews Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa

This is the second conversation in our series, Catalysts, that profiles people whose craft—defined broadly—advances justice and equality.

Moffat Takadiwa is a contemporary Zimbabwean artist who repurposes post-consumer waste such as bottle caps, toothbrushes, keyboard keys, and clothing buttons by transforming them into large-scale sculptures, tapestries, and installations. Takadiwa’s work has been exhibited all over the world. One of his most recent exhibits, Recoded Memories, was 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.

Nadeen Kharputly: It’s wonderful to meet you [on Zoom], and to have your work here at Washington and Lee University, but we wish you had gotten to join us in October [2025] for the opening of Recoded Memories. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about the decision that you made not to come here.

Moffat Takadiwa: To give you a bit of background, what happened was, before [I was supposed to come to] Washington and Lee, I went to São Paulo for the São Paulo Biennial. I never really had problems with customs [before], but for the first time, arriving in São Paulo, we were [almost] deported. It shocked me. I was traveling with my kid brother, who’s also my assistant, and it was his first international work trip with me.

After spending the whole night at the airport, we managed to sort the problem out, and we managed to get in. And we did the exhibition and I returned home. I was supposed to spend only a few days in Zimbabwe and then proceed to the U.S. But I started to ask questions to my friends who know how immigration works in the U.S., because when I got my visa, the [embassy] told me that a lot of things have changed in the U.S. That worried me a lot, and because of the situation that happened in São Paulo, I wasn’t sure [about traveling]. And a lot of people were saying, if you think you might have an issue at this time, it’s better not to attempt. The embassy was even instructed to stop issuing U.S. visas. So I was left with no option but to say maybe it’s better not to go.

NK: I’m so sorry to hear that, and again, we wish we could have had you here alongside your work.

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.” How do you approach language in your work?

MT: 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 pretty much 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 dumpsites 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: What was the most challenging object for you to work with, and what made it challenging?

MT: I use toothbrushes, toothbrush heads, a lot in my work. But at first, they were very difficult [to work with]. I tried by all means to imagine how to use them. When my team brought the toothbrushes for me, at first I was like, why toothbrushes? And they said, “Do you know what? We see [them] a lot in the dumping field. . . There are a lot of people who collect things to resell to other companies that do recycling.” So the dumping site is almost a zone where people are competing for certain objects. But people leave toothbrushes. And I was wondering why, so my team said the plastic [poses a challenge to] the grinding mills used for recycling. The plastic doesn’t really sink like other plastics. And also when it floods, toothbrushes are among the materials that float; they are actually washed almost all the way to the ocean. So toothbrushes are a big problem when it comes to waste and recycling, because a lot of people don’t want to recycle them. So with this understanding, I was like, I’m interested, I want to work with them. I cut and use the top part only. And I came up with a way in which I would drill holes on the side and then fabricate them. In some of the early works with toothbrushes, the gallerists were worried about these gross, used toothbrushes. It’s difficult to place them with collectors, and so they become challenging in so many ways. But gradually, people started to really like the works with toothbrushes, and they became popular.

NK: I imagine [toothbrushes] are really difficult to clean. I’m sure physically and emotionally difficult to handle, because people use them to clean their mouths. But also, what a great symbol for speaking and language, because you’re using these items to clean the thing from which language [emerges].

MT: And also, interestingly enough, the work I did at the São Paulo Biennial, I had a whole floor covered in toothbrushes that people were stepping on to get into my structure, and I saw a lot of kids wanted to sit on them, almost touch them, and their parents were okay with it. It made me think a lot about how toothbrushes carry a lot of human DNA. So, thinking of objects that carry human DNA, and using them to speak on certain subjects that reflect on our everyday routine and culture, that was really cool to me.

NK: At first I thought the pill packets were some of the most intimate objects in the collection, at least here at Washington and Lee, because they’re medicine that people take in order to heal. But now that you’ve described [your work with] toothbrushes and how you’re surprised and challenged by them, I think maybe the toothbrushes are some of the most intimate objects [in your work].

MT: With African knowledge systems, when people talk about ecological issues, they speak a lot about healing the land, and they connect it to colonialism and other things. In Zimbabwe, there are a lot of words that connect the coming in of foreigners or colonialism to the destruction of the land itself. And the healing of the land is also connected to the healing of the people. Everyday medicine and healing of people are actually healing of the land, and healing of the land is healing of the people. All these layers and these things are connected. When we are healing people, we are actually healing the land. When people respect the land, they respect their own values, and so on.

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: You see that cyclical nature in your work, in your sculptures themselves, there are so many circles, things that wind around, and there’s a repetition of all of the materials. It’s incredible that the pieces that we get to see in your exhibits are a reflection of the cyclical and repetitive nature of the process itself.

MT: I take those circular shapes from a lot of traditional African motifs, especially kitchen and utility objects. Even [elements of] infrastructure, like in housing and so on, in Southern Africa, have round parts. A lot of things have this circular shape, which, on researching, I ended up understanding that the circular coexists with natural phenomena—heavy rain and wind can easily navigate these round shapes [in contrast to] square, boxed houses.

NK: [I wanted to connect] your work and the way that you talk about narrative and knowledge to another type of knowledge system. Your work centers weaving as the source of narrative and knowledge. Weaving is a comparatively older knowledge system than writing. What might a writer learn from weaving as a narrative form?

MT: Weaving is loaded, beyond just fabricating and putting materials together. Weaving carries not just a language, but calculations, mathematics, sciences, and even other ways of writing. I try to construct my own language, often by placing computer keys side-by-side. Because what I try to communicate to other writers and other languages is that it’s possible for us to create a language for the future, for us to create this language that maybe we are not yet ready to understand or to believe, but it’s there. And this language is usually made of our shared histories, which might be colonial history. So I use the remnants of whatever we have lived through to construct a possibility.

NK: That’s one of the powers of literature, it allows you to envision what’s possible. . . this is what our past was, this is what present we’re in, but what kinds of futures are possible for us? I was also thinking about comparisons between writing and the work that you do, and the kinds of storytelling that are shared by both forms. With Western approaches to writing, texts are often authored by one person, they tend to privilege one voice. Of course, there are exceptions. But your team involves twenty to forty people, so I was wondering if you could talk about the collective nature of your work.

MT: Looking at how a lot of African creatives used to work as a reference: they would work collectively in fieldwork, harvesting. So there’s a lot of communal input in building knowledge, in creating a work, in creating a narrative. You can’t create it alone, you need to work with other people. In Shona, there are a lot of words to describe that: nhimbe is one of the words, where, when we have something important to do, you invite other people from your community, and you work together to create that thing.

In my work, I try to give a bit of leeway to the people who assist me, in that they are also free to make mistakes—to a certain level—on the work, because the work carries different voices. As much as I’m the driver, as much as I’m in control, the work will have different voices in it, different inputs.

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?”

When I think of weaving, the act and history of weaving, the main image that comes to my mind is typically of women who are weaving and talking together and sharing stories as they’re engaged in this work. But with you and your team, it’s men who are doing the weaving, right? It’s a team of entirely men?

MT: I also have a few girls who have joined the studio, but you are right, it’s mostly men who do most of my weaving, but we actually have a lot of ladies who work in the dumping sites, mothers with their babies, and so on.

NK: With [your team of mostly] men, how does the gender dynamic impact the conversations and the stories in your studio? Do you talk, do you tell stories, do you have conversations when you’re engaged in this work, or is it silent? Do you listen to music? What’s that process like?

MT: Normally, they play music. In the studio, we play a lot of Thomas Mapfumo, who I also reference a lot in my work; we play mbira-based music. The gentlemen are free to share their own stories, and we weave, and we talk about the work, about what the materials are doing, if something is cracking a lot, or things like that. And we have regular studio sounds: the humming of the drilling machine, it’s almost therapeutic.

NK: I was wondering if you could talk about Mbare Art Space, and what it was like for you to transform that space, which was a former colonial beer hall, into its current form.

MT: Mbare Arts Space is an extension of my work. You know, when I usually speak of hope and giving another life, [I include] dead places, because the place [Mbare] was suffering from urban decay. It’s a remnant of colonial history, where the beer gardens were built for African people. And it is also in the center of one of the African neighborhoods that were built to restrict African people [to this] neighborhood. So inheriting this place and trying to change it for artists and creative energy was quite a big task. We tried to make sure that we are changing even the infrastructure. The entrances were supposed to be very narrow to restrict and control people, so we are adding new layers to the structure, expanding certain sides, and so on.

The other facet of the project is digging into the various histories of this community called Mbare. Even the history of liquor itself has a very deep history in Southern Africa. There were so many laws that were passed against liquor, even the brewing of African beer and liquor was restricted. But many revolutions in Africa came through shebeens—unauthorized places, which were run by women. They would brew beer in the backyards and invite men, very powerful politicians would go there and drink in private, in secret. And then revolutions would begin, [with] people talking about deeper issues and so on. So these are some of the things that we are also researching and publishing.

We also do exhibitions and run an art residence program. We have a few artists in residence at the Mbare Art Space.

NK: Would you talk about that? About some of the educational and mentoring elements of the space?

MT: We allow emerging talents to come, use the space, and share resources. We are a platform for these young people to discuss their work, exchange ideas. We don’t really teach per se, but we allow people to exchange ideas and talk about their work. We do a lot of crit sessions. And also we urge our artists-in-residence to work without the kinds of pressure from the market, we encourage work in which they just show without the expectation to sell. To communicate and just make work, that’s what we try to do. We also encourage the Mbare community to engage with the artists. So some of the artists are beginning to learn how to engage and make work that speaks to their community, rather than just thinking about exhibitions in London, in the U.S., and how to speak more and put our people at the center of our communication.

NK: Another cyclical process, the work that’s happening [at Mbare]. That’s beautiful.

I’m so grateful that you were able to share time with us, and to share your process and your work and get people who are reading this [interview] to think about how your work can influence and inspire the different kinds of work that they do, whatever their medium.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.