HOW TO HEAL A B-R-O-K-E-N WORLD – Cemetery of Belongings, 2025
Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku
installation, mixed media, public intervention
Cemetery of Belongings is a site-specific, unsanctioned installation that transforms Ghana’s Osu Cemetery into a visceral reflection on life, death, healing, and the invisible weight of what we leave behind. As part of the ongoing series HOW TO HEAL A B-R-O-K-E-N WORLD, this iteration draws on the transient materiality of discarded second-hand clothing and textile waste—fabric once worn, once lived in, now rendered disposable.
The installation will drape grave markers, empty plots, and unmarked tombs with layers of shredded garments—ghosts of global consumption and fast fashion’s aftermath. These textiles become shrouds, veils, wounds, and whispers, honoring forgotten lives while mourning the violence of abandonment—both environmental and spiritual. By situating textile waste within a cemetery, this work explores:
Healing and decay: How do we mourn in a world addicted to forgetting?
Material memory: What do the dead inherit when the living discard so much?
Belonging and dislocation: How can we claim space in a world that has no use for the used?
Sacred trespass: Can art desecrate, or does it sanctify when it acknowledges what others neglect?
The Osu Cemetery is more than a final resting place—it is a public archive of erasure, memory, and class divides. Graves here range from opulent stone tombs to unmarked mounds—mirroring the economic and ecological inequalities embodied by the global second-hand clothing trade. By bringing textile waste into this space, the work exposes a silent entanglement: how the bodies buried in Ghana rest beneath the detritus of the Global North’s consumption. This isn’t just installation—it is a form of cultural grief work. A confrontation. A haunting.
Gallery
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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