This Nigerian knows the key combination for art
In any case, if you can't or don't want to use your keyboard anymore, Nigerian Uzoma Patrick is definitely the right person for you. And the best thing is, his work doesn't need to be restarted or updated!
Category
ЁЯЧЮ
NewsTranscript
00:00Could you imagine how you could save the environment by just clicking the right button on your keyboard?
00:07Uzuma Patrick did.
00:10I've been reading about the dangers of plastics and burning plastic and how it affects the environment.
00:21His work clearly stands for environmental protection.
00:25But has it always been Uzuma's concern to fight climate change?
00:30How did he come up with his big idea of computer recycling?
00:34What initially inspired me for using old computer keyboard as my major medium for creating art was where I grew up from.
00:41I grew up in the industrial area of Enugu State.
00:44While I was working with my dad, one day our technician came around and they wanted to decongest the store.
00:57And they were packing the things out, then they said they wanted to burn it.
01:03So I casually told them to just leave the keyboard for me that I'm going to find a use for them.
01:09All over the world, old computers and other electronic devices generate huge piles of e-waste full of hazardous components.
01:19Africa is one of the world's main destinations for large shipments of electronic waste from the United States and Europe.
01:26In West Africa, Nigeria is particularly heavily polluted with over 1.1 million tons of e-waste per year.
01:36Which comes from both domestic and imported electrical appliances.
01:40But how can one man change the cycle?
01:42Why it's actually important for me to contribute to sustainability in Nigeria is because we are facing a global challenge.
01:50I mean, global warming is not foreign to us.
01:54You go around, you look at the ground.
01:58Plastics, nylons are contributing to our landfills.
02:02Now I am choosing an area where nobody is looking at the e-waste.
02:07I want to bring the material that we don't know that we are trashing them wrongly to the general public
02:11so that they understand that these materials can be properly recycled.
02:14Apart from the hazardous materials he might come across in the dumpsters, what are the challenges posed by this unconventional medium?
02:22The process of creating my works involves getting my keyboards and allied parts from the dump sites and other hardware engineers.
02:34Then when I bring them, I bring them to my own personal scrap dump.
02:40Then most of the scraps are majorly black and silver colored keyboard.
02:47Then there are my works that really need me to use silver colors and there are the ones that need me to use black keyboards.
02:55It depends on what I have in my sketch.
02:58It depends on what I have in my sketch that sustains the keyboard and the allied part I'm going to use.
03:04And after getting the keyboards, I have to painstakingly remove the keyboard from the board, the keys from the board.
03:11I mean, after removing the keyboard, that is one of the major challenges.
03:14And getting this keyboard to stick together, because they are little fragments, sometimes it's very difficult to make them stay together.
03:22And it makes my work very painstaking and it takes a lot of time.
03:26The common interpretation of digital art is testament to its ability to create new and unique forms of artistic expression through technology.
03:35But what do people find in his large, futuristic piles of junk?
03:40In my work, you see materials like flowers, you see representation of flowers.
03:46I do these flowers with upcycled metal plates.
03:52And the reason I put them in this sculpture is because I want to create a balance between the industrial world and the natural world.
04:01We have to strike a balance so that we don't mess up our environment.
04:06Ozuma's body of work is deeply rooted in the contemporary understanding of socially shaped unconscious behaviours, primarily influenced by our immediate society.
04:17This sculpture signifies direction and knowing the purpose, why we are the way we are, why we need to come together.
04:25It has elements of our industrial life embedded in it.
04:31So it just gives us that sense of understanding that we must have a direction to where we are going to if we are going to make the ecosystem work.
04:42Since growing up, Ozuma's knack for repairing electronics and crafting toy cars evolved into a successful career in the art realm.
04:51Now he transforms discarded materials into captivating works, contributing to environmental sustainability.
05:01Transcribed by https://otter.ai