THE CURRENCY - Sensing 1 Agbogbloshie

An experimental poetic investigation of one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites, Agbogbloshie, as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political and technological processes

The Currency - Sensing #1 Agbogbloshie is part of the long-term artistic research project THE CURRENCY by Elom 20ce (Togo), Musquiqui Chihying (Taiwan) and Gregor Kasper (Germany).

Through a transcontinental, multidisciplinary, collective practice, THE CURRENCY explores the possibilities of currencies to question capitalist logics, exploitation as well as power structures in order to re-explore the relationships between humans and their interactions with the non-human world. Global interconnections of capital flows, technological developments, and spiritual and collective resistant practices between Africa, Asia, and Europe are explored.

Sensing #1 Agbogbloshie is part of a larger investigation that traces the global cycles of raw materials and electronic devices and their half:value:times at one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites in Agbogbloshie, Accra/Ghana - economically, socially, power-politically and technologically.

Sensing #1 Agbogbloshie focuses on a documentary observation of the site as well as a performative field research that uses experimental sound generation methods to make electromagnetic waves of the electronic waste audible, thus enabling an expanded sensory access to it that goes beyond the merely visible.
Orienting himself to the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth, Elom 20ce examines the organic environment of Agbogbloshie in relation to the remnants of the recycling of electronic devices that takes place here, and also questions the spiritual connections to this practice.
In repeating and embodying the generated experimental electronic sounds with his own voice, Elom 20ce reconnects them to the human experience and places this perspective at the center of the investigation.
This performative field research is also a form of urban mining, but instead of being based on the profit-oriented recovery of raw materials from urban space for a circular economy, it is rather a critical method for observing and reflecting on human practice.