It is the year 2050 and we did not put enough effort into taking care of the planet. There was COP26…27…28… yet all we did was pledge and talk until it was too late. The weather conditions are extreme, we cannot find clean water anywhere, there is not enough food to feed us all. We have been displaced, we belong nowhere. However, in every challenge there is an opportunity and from this adversity an army has emerged. They are the WASTE WARRIORS. They come in peace, they come to restore, they come to teach us how to build a new world with the things we once threw away. They come to remind us of the places we have lived.
In 2020, we paid our first visit to the New Kuchingoro IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp in Abuja where we launched our NKWO Transform project. We were struck by two things :- The camp is actually inside the town, about a 30 minute drive away from our main studio and all of the children in the primary school were born in the camp, the place they call home, the place they play and eat and sleep and dream…
In their patchwork shelters the adults carry the memories of the past, the children carry the hope of the future…like the little girl with her blue book skipping ‘home’ after school or the boys who already see the value in the things people leave behind. This was the inspiration for the collection we showed at Lagos Fashion Week in October 2021 just after the world started to open up again. It was also our hope that new conversations would open up on the continent about the need to find and develop a new mindset for discarded material waste.
*The New Kuchingoro IDP camp is currently home to about 1,750 people who were displaced in 2014 from their ancestral homes in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe and Bauchi States – all in the North East of Nigeria - by the Boko Haram insurgency. *
Places We Have Lived
