Cemetery of Belongings, 2025
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku
discarded second-hand clothing, textile waste, jute rope, biodegradable stitching thread
Part of the ongoing series HOW TO HEAL A BROKEN WORLD: Fragile Origins, Futile Foundations
Osu Cemetery, in the heart of Accra, holds a layered history. Established in the late 19th century under British colonial rule, it was not simply a place for mourning. It was part of a broader project of governance. Before colonization, many Ga families buried their dead within their compounds, beneath their houses, keeping the ancestors physically and spiritually tied to the home. The 1888 Cemeteries Ordinance disrupted this practice, declaring home burials illegal and forcing bodies into state-controlled cemeteries.
The official justification was public health, but beneath this was a deeper politics. By relocating the dead, colonial authorities freed up land for sale, commodified urban space, and undermined traditional claims to property and belonging. The cemetery thus became a tool of power — a way of reorganizing the living by controlling the dead.
Resistance was fierce. Families exhumed bodies in secret midnight rituals, returning ancestors to the home. These acts were not only about burial preference but about preserving spiritual continuity, belonging, and the sanctity of place.
Today, Accra confronts a new form of colonial legacy — not through death, but through waste. Every week, thousands of tons of discarded second-hand clothing arrive in Ghana, much of it unsellable, much of it destined for landfills, beaches, and open spaces. This textile flood mirrors the earlier colonial intrusion: land, water, and communities once again bear the weight of foreign impositions. Waste has become a new necropolitics — deciding whose environments become burial grounds for other people’s belongings.
Cemetery of Belongings, staged at Osu Cemetery, stitches these two histories together. By draping discarded garments across graves and pathways, the installation transforms clothing into bodies, fabric into memory. Each textile carries the intimacy of touch, identity, and absence. In the cemetery, they become symbolic corpses — standing in for both the ancestors displaced by colonial law and the communities today suffocated by waste colonialism.
This work insists that healing requires remembering. It reclaims Osu Cemetery not as a site of neglect or colonial order, but as a living archive of entanglement: between the dead and the discarded, the past and the present, dispossession and resistance. It calls us to face the ghosts — not only of colonialism, but of consumption — and to imagine what it means to belong in a broken world.
Image credit: Ato Abbiw, Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku Collaborators: NOVO COLLECTIVE, Osu Cemetery. Installation team: Osu Cemetery Internment Team, HTHABW Team
On Site
About the Artist
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku (b. 1994), artist, engineer, architect of memory- born in Cape-Coast, Ghana. The artist’s early years were influenced by the expansive textile collection of his grandmother who was a Queen Mother. With a background in Civil Engineering, he discovered the contemporary reuse of discarded fabric and textile waste whiles working on his final year project in the University, experimenting on textile waste recycling and reuse in the construction industry. Aggrey uses discarded second-hand clothing popularly known in his country as “dead white man’s clothing“, creating large scale installations and works of abstraction that are exuberant and full of colour.
Motivated by the historical elements embedded in objects at the end of their life cycle, he is particularly intrigued by the transference of these narratives into vulnerable present spaces. His aim is to deconstruct or reconstruct perceived narratives embedded within societal structures and clichés, especially in the context of cultural appropriations that have endured for centuries, while documenting our humanness in a culture that uses and quickly forgets.
Aggrey’s practice explores the concepts of waste colonialism, identity, consumerism, climate change and sustainability. You often encounter his work where you wouldn’t expect to find art- on beaches, the ocean, cemeteries, landfills, in abandoned factories. In places where textile waste piles up in layers, he installs monumental surfaces made of garments that once belonged to someone.
This is not a metaphor, but reality. The materials in his work have lived, warmed, been worn and then discarded, shipped, forgotten. His works are not traditional paintings. They are textile sediments. Layered with pigment, chemistry, and memory, Emmanuel transforms discarded clothing into layered scales of nuanced connections- his work plays a crucial role in exploring our deepest desires, collectively frailed humanity whiles creating a pathway for a sustainable future.
He has exhibited at ArtBasel Miami and other notable exhibitions.
This is not about upcycling. It is about documenting how much human life a single piece of fabric can carry and how quickly we forget those lives.
Since 2023, Emmanuel has been working on a project that is not meant to be finished: How to Heal a Broken World- a lifetime project of textile archiving and material innovation. A textile intervention that travels from place to place, constantly growing, collecting materials, absorbing traces. Emmanuel often speaks of fabric as a vessel. For memory. For pain. For questions without quick answers. Only with fabric. And time. And the willingness to listen.
Aggrey’s project has been realized in locations such as the Atlantic Ocean, JamesTown Fishing Harbour, Kpone Landfill Site, Schloss Augustusburg, Nubuke Foundation, Makers United Chemnitz Festival, Alte Utting, Villa Stuck Museum, among others. He is also the recepient of the 2025 Ellipse Prize and will have a solo exhibition at the AKAA Fair in Paris in October,2025.
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