Today, we are venturing somewhere most of us actively try to avoid thinking about: the world of discarded materials. Or, in plain English — waste.

Now, what do we typically do with waste? We throw it away. If we are feeling particularly virtuous, we recycle it. Job done, conscience clear, off we go.

But for a handful of artists, that discarded pile of stuff isn't an ending at all — it is where the story actually begins. And here is the part that might surprise you: none of the artists we are looking at today is primarily interested in recycling. It may appear on the surface, but scratch a little deeper and it quickly becomes clear that these works are about something else entirely.

So today, we are travelling through the Middle East and Africa, meeting artists who take waste — proper, unglamorous, cast-off waste — and turn it into something else entirely: stories of civilisations, political conflict and, quite often, something deeply, unmistakably personal.

If there is one artist who embodies the idea of turning waste into art, it is El Anatsui — the Ghanaian-born, Nigeria-based artist who, at 82, still works from his studio in Nsukka, with his pieces regularly gracing major museums and biennales.

The material that would come to define his career entered his life almost by accident. In the late 1990s, Anatsui came across a discarded bag of aluminium liquor-bottle caps by the roadside near his studio. Rather than rushing to use them, he left the bag untouched for nearly two years before beginning to experiment. Once he did, he discovered a material with seemingly endless possibilities. By flattening, folding and stitching thousands of caps together with copper wire, he developed the monumental, textile-like sculptures that have since become his signature.

Today, his practice extends beyond bottle caps to include discarded liquor-bottle seals, can fragments, printing plates and other found metal scraps. Yet Anatsui has never been particularly interested in being described as a "sustainable artist". For him, the real fascination lies not in recycling but in transformation — watching an object that once served an ordinary commercial purpose shed its previous identity and become something entirely new.

That idea comes together in one of his best-known works, Earth's Skin. Composed of thousands of discarded bottle caps and seals, the shimmering installation unfolds like an enormous woven textile. Its rippling folds evoke mountains, rivers and eroded landscapes, while the title invites us to imagine the Earth's surface itself.

Afra Al Suwaidi is an Emirati mixed-media artist whose practice has always centred on objects. From the outset, these were never clutter or discarded rubbish, but domestic, home-related items — Lego bricks, sweets, toys — that allowed her to speak intimately about memory and childhood.

Her focus shifted in 2023, following the UAE's Year of Sustainability, when Al Suwaidi decided to expand her range of materials, turning to objects that might otherwise end up in landfill: discarded soft toys, plastic water bottles, old magazines and sweet wrappers. The change in materials didn't alter her storytelling — the underlying themes remained the same — but it did shift her perspective.

Let's look at one of her best-known projects, Recess, as an example. Although the piece predates her explicit turn towards sustainability, it almost foreshadows that shift. The body of work consists of discarded stuffed toys, covered and partially engulfed in plaster. As Al Suwaidi explains, the installation recreates a setting in which playtime turns to trauma, resembling the silent echo of mistreated children, while questioning how proximity and closeness can make us feel either safe or unsafe.

That openness to materials continues to shape her practice today. As for what comes next, even Al Suwaidi doesn't know. She keeps a stockpile of discarded materials in her studio and lets the objects themselves guide the final form of each sculpture.

If El Anatsui's practice is rooted in weaving, Ibrahim Mahama's is defined by monumentality. The Ghanaian artist is known for vast installations that wrap entire buildings or fill exhibition spaces with worn jute sacks, abandoned railway tracks, old furniture and other industrial remnants. For Mahama, scale isn't simply about physical size; it is what allows him to tell equally expansive stories about history, labour and global trade.

His use of discarded materials might recall recycling, but that isn’t really the point. These objects function more like historical documents. The jute sacks, for instance, once carried cocoa, charcoal or food across West Africa, picking up traces of countless journeys along the way. Mahama treats them less as waste and more as witnesses — physical evidence of Ghana's post-colonial history.

That idea comes through clearly in Parliament of Ghosts, one of his best-known installations. It recreates a parliamentary chamber out of 120 discarded train seats, railway tracks, station furniture and other salvaged remnants of Ghana's defunct colonial railway network — originally built by the British to move cocoa, timber and minerals to the coast for export. When the railways fell out of use, they left these fragments behind. By bringing them into the gallery, Mahama turns them into a space where the ghosts of history, politics and labour still seem to speak.

How the work is made matters just as much as the final result. Mahama's installations are assembled and stitched together by teams of local artisans and workers, making collaboration central to his process. That choice puts human labour front and center — both in the artwork itself and in the global systems of production his work exposes.

What does it mean to build something from the remains of destruction? This question lies at the heart of Shareef Sarhan's practice. For the Palestinian multidisciplinary artist, photographer and designer, working with rubble from bombed buildings, industrial scrap and abandoned aluminium isn't simply an artistic choice but a deeply personal one. These materials are part of the landscape he has lived in and witnessed firsthand, carrying memories of conflict and everyday life in Gaza.

Sarhan began working with these materials in 2017, collecting discarded aluminium and industrial remnants from factories and workshops across Gaza. Rather than treating them as waste, he transforms them into works that preserve memories of a place shaped by conflict.

One of the clearest examples is Gaza Lighthouse. Built entirely from materials salvaged from beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings, the sculpture reimagines the remnants of destruction as something purposeful and enduring.

Its power lies in three interconnected ideas. First, the rubble becomes a witness to Palestine's political and social history. Second, rather than being abandoned, these fragments are preserved and given a new role. And finally, there is the symbolism of the lighthouse itself. Built from the debris of destruction yet fully functional, it continues to do exactly what a lighthouse is meant to do: illuminate and help others find their way.

el Seed is the French-Tunisian artist the whole world associates with one thing: calligraffiti. For most of his career, waste has had nothing to do with his work. But there is one project that would be criminal to skip when talking about this theme.

The work in question is Perception: a monumental mural spanning more than 50 buildings in Manshiyat Naser, Cairo — home to the Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian community that has collected, sorted and recycled Cairo's rubbish for generations. Despite running one of the most efficient informal recycling systems in the world (they recycle up to 85% of the waste they collect), the Zabbaleen have long been marginalised and stigmatised as "garbage people."

And, as you can probably guess by now, the story here is really about prejudice. Perception invites viewers to look beyond the label of "garbage collectors" and see a community whose labour quietly keeps Cairo running. He spoke more about this project, as well as his wider practice, in our interview.