When Elias Sime was in art school, his teachers threw his work in the trash. It was the late 1980s, the final years of Ethiopian communism, and art students were expected to produce socialist realism. But Sime was more interested in materials—in trash, as it were. ratupoker

Today, Sime is now known worldwide for gargantuan abstractions—a new series debuts today at Spazio Tana in Venice—comprising intricately arranged e-waste that he buys, often by the truckload, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato market—the largest open-air market in Africa. When I visited in the market in March, I saw mountains of keyboards and motherboards, and spools of coated wires sorted by color.

The sheer volume of the e-waste in Sime’s work can be a shock to Western viewers, who are used to sending off trash never to be seen again. For this reason, his work is often described as a kind of commentary on recycling. But Sime was making these for 25 years before he started showing in the Western world. For him, the work is really about our addiction to technology: he wants to make you think about all the ways connectivity has changed, to question our addiction to constant upgrades.

Resourceful reclamation is not novel for Sime, but part of his everyday ethos. Sime’s approach, of tending to his surroundings, pervades everything he does. In Addis Ababa, I visited Zoma—Sime’s compound replete with a museum, a school, a restaurant, and a farm. He funds it all with sales from his artworks. The school is critical to Sime’s mission: workers at Zoma repeatedly mentioned the corruption involved in the national curriculum, and the necessity of interventions. ratupoker

The seed for the complex was planted in 2002, when Sime and his collaborator Meskerem Assegued, an anthropologist and curator, bought a dilapidated house, thinking they’d convert it into a studio. Sime began adding to the structure with mud and straw, a vernacular technique, and from there, his project evolved organically. Now, it features a half-dozen mud buildings, each sculptured with their own intricate patterns. Assegued was put off by the rampant introduction of toxic building materials into Ethiopia, when vernacular architectural forms had proven perfectly durable. Driving around the city, you’ll find countless dwellings made of mud and corrugated steel, behind which uninhabited skeletons of luxury condo buildings ominously loom. Addis Ababa is developing fast—and in ways that leave locals skeptical. A Zoma worker named Teddy put it like this: “Where there is corruption, there is construction.” ratupoker