‘Okrika Reclaimed’: Confronting fast fashion’s fallout through art

Ghana is the final stop for the world’s unwanted clothing, where the fast fashion industry’s overflow ends up in bales on the backs of porters, flooding Kantamanto Market and, ultimately, choking beaches and drains with textile waste.

Okrika Reclaimed, a site-specific, socially engaged art installation, returns the gaze to the heart of the crisis in Ghana, with radical intention. Taking place at Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, one of the world’s largest second-hand clothing markets and textile waste sites, Okrika Reclaimed reimagines discarded clothing as both material and metaphor.

Led by interdisciplinary artist Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, the project merges environmental activism with art through large-scale installations, live performance and hands-on community engagement. With workshops, clean-ups and creative reuse at its core, the project activates a space both devastated and defined by global fashion’s cast-offs.

Local collaboration and partnership with FCA Ghana and Revival Earth, a textile upcycling NGO and fabric lab in Kantamanto Market, has made this project possible. Occupying a stall in the market, the artist works in direct dialogue with tailors, merchants and other key actors to produce responsive works from within the ecosystem itself.

A particularly meaningful part of the project involves the kayayei—women head porters, many of whom have migrated from northern Ghana and seeking work. The scale of the second-hand clothing trade bears heavily, literally and figuratively, on their bodies.

Five of them are currently working with the artist to weave sculptural headpieces that reflect their role and experience within the market. Beyond this phase, the project gestures toward a broader conversation: how can we imagine and support alternatives to this physically demanding labour?

Real-time performances and installations will unfold on site, culminating in two key events – Public Talk at Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Accra – July 10, 2025; and Runway Performance at Kantamanto Market – Scheduled for July 11 or 12, 2025.

Supported by the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) Environmental Art Grant, administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), New York, Okrika Reclaimed calls attention to the inequities and environmental damage created by Western second-hand clothing exports to Africa. An estimated 40 percent of these imports are unusable, turning into “clothing mountains” with grave consequences for local ecosystems and economies.

For over a decade, the artist behind Okrika Reclaimed has investigated the long shadow of the second-hand clothing trade across Africa and the Global South, challenging systems of consumerism disguised as humanitarianism. In its first phase, the project intercepted used clothing bales in New York and collaborated with immigrant communities to explore labour, exploitation and global waste circuits, culminating in a large-scale textile sculpture exhibited at the 2023 British Textile Biennial.

Now, Okrika Reclaimed returns to the place most affected: Ghana. Working in and with Kantamanto Market, the installation transforms the market into a living artwork — a space of resistance, reclamation and visibility. This next chapter not only critiques the legacy of second-hand fashion but also elevates local voices in shaping sustainable futures, by the Global South, for the Global South.

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