The Nest At Documenta 15: Return To Sender

We are thrilled to be presenting our artwork installation ‘Return To Sender’ this June at Documenta 15! Documenta is a world-renowned quinquennial contemporary art exhibition that takes place in Kassel, Germany, and features artists from all continents whose work has had a significant influence on modern art. We talked a little more about the exhibition in our previous post here!

The installation we are launching, ‘Return To Sender’ is supposed to evoke a massive sprawl of waste. The structure will be constructed of used garments, called mitumba in Kenya, fashioned into bales to take up tens of square metres in an otherwise pristine public recreational space. It occupies what is otherwise public, communal, recreational space, and is intended to be visually distressing to force confrontation of the real issues. Return To Sender echoes the true breadth of the uncontrolled consumption in the Global North, and the stringent regulations that overtly force the movement of these materials to the Global South, to become the business and headache of less industrialized nations to deal with, as both waste and non-waste. An inordinate amount of textile waste comes to Africa—up to 40 percent of each bale of imported second-hand clothes is completely unusable and thus taken straight to landfills—also forcing the folk who trade in them to incur high overheads on the risk of a useless bale. The installation will be accompanied by thematic ambient sound recorded at various second-hand clothing markets across Nairobi playing outside the installation.

‘Return To Sender’ will also be accompanied by a video piece which we’ve named ‘Return To Sender - Delivery Details’ that will explore the complicated situation of mostly second-hand textile waste in Kenya and Africa, through the viewpoints of different contributors and viewpoints. Delivery Details will play inside the installation.  

Documenta 15 will open on Saturday, June 18th, and will run for 100 days until September 25th this year,  in Kassel, Germany! If you are in Germany or are planning to be during these dates, do let us know what you think of our installation on any of our social media pages.