Installation
2025
Dela Anyah, Durosinmi, 2026, installation view, Atlas of Uncertainty, Origins Centre Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg, 2026.. Photograph by the artist.
Durosinmi (wait to rest) is an installation rooted in the roadside economies of vulcaniser shops in Ghana. These spaces are shaped by local improvisation and global waste flows — particularly used tyres exported from the Global North under recycling and second-life commodity schemes. What is discarded elsewhere becomes structural matter here, reorganising labour, architecture, and survival.
This condition has a specific history. The Bonsa Tyre Factory, established in 1963 as part of Ghana's post-independence industrialisation, collapsed in 1981 following political instability, successive coups, economic decline, and structural adjustment policies. As local production fell and purchasing power dropped, Ghana became dependent on imported second-hand tyres. Over time, this substitute material accumulated into surplus — forming both the working substrate of vulcaniser shops and a growing field of waste.
Vulcaniser shops also carry the mark of a longer history of forced movement across West Africa. From Ghana's Aliens Compliance Order (1969) to Nigeria's "Ghana Must Go" expulsions (1983), mobility has been repeatedly interrupted and enforced through displacement. These shops reflect that history in their form: built from corrugated metal, timber, and rubber along highways and intersections, they are designed to be dismantled, relocated, or abandoned. They are shaped not by permanence, but by the expectation of removal.
Within this double condition — material surplus and structural precarity — vulcaniser spaces become repair sites and accidental repositories at once. Tyres are patched and extended beyond their designed lifespan. What cannot be reused is absorbed into the built environment: walls, seating, partitions, and shelters made from the same material being salvaged. Architecture and waste become difficult to tell apart.
The installation is built from stacked discarded tyres, a suspended corrugated metal roof, and woven inner tubes. It follows the logic of these provisional structures without idealising them. The title, drawn from Yoruba, carries a double meaning: the desire for rest, and the difficulty of settling.
Durosinmi asks what kind of shelter emerges when the line between infrastructure and waste disappears — and finds in vulcaniser practice an answer already in motion.