Joan Otieno
has once again proved that she can not only turn ‘trash into treasure’, which
is also the title of the current exhibition of artworks by Warembo Wasanii and
her, the group’s founder and mama-mentor.
Joan can
also train young women (and several men) to cultivate the same transformative
power and prove it with an art exhibition that fills the whole ground floor of
Alliance Francaise. It was also evident on the show’s opening night when the
young (20-25 years old) Warembo women modeled their plastic fashions, all of which
they had created themselves.
Yet Joan
wasn’t just training tailors and seamstresses although she did teach them how
to create their own designs and cut out their own patterns. She was teaching a
growing squad of 14 young women and two men about conservation and how to save
the planet from choking to death on the garbage human beings generate one
plastic bag and bottle at a time.
She’s also
training aspiring artists how to create their own art materials by going with
her twice a week to dumpsites all over Eastlands where they get down to the
dirty business of collecting all things plastic, be they bottles, bags, wrappers
or spoons. They collect other forms of trash as well, such as Colgate
toothpaste tubes which they take back to their WW studio in Kariobangi North (registered
by Joan in 2018)
and clean
along with all the other junk they pick up.
“Everything
we use to create our art comes from the dumpsite,” says Joan [who’s gotten no donor
support either to start or sustain her group]. The only exceptions are the
tools that she buys, such as scissors, needles, threads, a hammer and slicer
used to, for instance, cut open the Colgate tubes.
“After we
wash the opened tubes, we hammer them flat, then stitch them together into
fabric,” she adds, noting that one toothpaste tube dress was made and modeled
in the fashion show on opening night.
Other
dresses were made and modeled that night out of everything from Trust condom and
Always sanitary pad wrappers to Naivas and Tusky bags to Blueband lids and
Kabras sugar sacks.
Only one
dress is currently on display at AF. It is the huge plastic bag gown that Joan
created especially for the exhibition poster photo. “It’s called ‘Mother Nature
Isn’t Happy’”, says Joan who had a special photo shoot with her standing inside
on dumpsite, her face painted like a ghost. “I stood for the shoot, and people
walked past me without even noticing me,” her bag dress blending in with the
trash landscape. “But when I jumped up and made noise, people ran away, scared I
was a monster or a ghost.”
Joan’s
original plan was to train school girl dropouts, but as it is, all of her
trainees are Form 4 graduates plus three university students. “The students
come whenever they don’t have classes,” she says noting that currently, eight
of her women come to the studio every day. They are Risper, Lorraine, Esther,
Yvonne, Eddah, Rita, Aggie and Brenda. The rest come when they can since Joan
puts no pressure on any of them. But she admits, one of her girls go pregnant
soon after WW began.
“She created
one of the [plastic bag] paintings before she went to deliver,” says Joan who
adds that one reason she opened WW was to provide young women with a safe haven
where they could learn new skills and not be vulnerable to the hazards women
and girls can find on the streets.
At Alliance Francaise,
most of the artworks are portraits made from the same materials as the dresses,
including plastic soda bottles and party cups which get turned into fancy hair
styles.
Before
founding Warembo Wasanii, Joan was based at Dust Depo Art Studio where Patrick
Mukabi was her mentor. And before that, she trained in accounting at the Kenya
College of Accountancy.
“I had studied
art in secondary school, planning on following in my father’s footsteps since
he was a professional painter. But my step-father insisted I study accounts.”
Fortunately,
she met Mukabi at The GoDown before he moved to the Railway Museum. Through him
she met another artist Longinos Nagila who helped her find the Kariobangi North
studio.
Joan and the
Warembo Wasanii women have had several recycled art fashion shows: one at UN
Habitat, one at USIU and one at a SWAN fair (Support women artists now).
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