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This essay investigates the practices of artistic and curatorial appropriation and reuse of discarded materials as forms of political and cultural resistance within postcolonial contexts. Moving from theories on the agency of objects and the social life of things, it examines how certain dissident subjectivities have reclaimed what hegemonic systems had already classified, discarded, and rendered invisible. At the center of this investigation emerges cardboard: a diasporic matter par excellence, simultaneously waste and shelter, anonymous packaging and a surface for political inscription. Traversing different geographies and temporalities – from political claims articulated in the streets and the intimate spaces of diaspora to major international exhibition structures – this essay follows the metamorphoses of this humble material, showing how the biography of a discarded object can repeatedly become a narrative of those who have crossed through it.

THE AGENCY OF OBJECTS WITHIN THE POSTCOLONIAL CONSTELLATION

Every object is a social agent. Objects incorporate within their materiality the projections of the systems of production that generated, circulated, discarded, and reused them. An object is not a neutral entity, complete and self-contained; rather, it is already a form of narration. In his foundational text Art and Agency (1998), British social anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed reading things as social agents capable of exerting an efficacy – an agency – that does not depend on an autonomous intentionality, but rather on the network of relations that pass through them. Objects cease to be mere reflections of human will and become relational actors, integral components of the ecosystem in which structure of knowledge and submerged memories are articulated. Within the complexity of the present, the agency of an object emerges through the incessant flow of material dynamics and transformative forces underlying a globalized society: agency becomes the outcome of the superstructures of a multidirectional power system that connects matter to its geopolitical and economic context. In this framework, Alfred Gell’s theory of agency functions as a starting point for defining the object as an extension of the intentionality of the agent who produced it, but above all as an extension of the social and political superstructures that intervened in its creation.
This introductory theoretical framework allows for the formulation of a hypothesis that will accompany the arguments developed throughout this article: if matter carries, embodied within itself, the superstructures of the system that generated, circulated, and discarded it, then the act of appropriating and resinifying that same matter means directly intervening in that system. Matter can be recognized as possessing a form of “vitality” a priori, capable of becoming a field of action for negotiations and transformations. Such vitality redefines matter as an active agent, continuously capable of reconfiguring itself beyond imposed hierarchies of value. Yet the dynamics of power that emerge within contexts of asymmetry, subalternity, and extraction – as revealed by colonial history – forcibly strip matter of its relational agency, reducing it to a commodity. The imbalances produced by relations of subordination operate through a systematic erasure of the biographical trajectories of matter, forcing objects to embody contradictions, to acquire value solely within the mechanisms of global exchange, and to constantly negotiate themselves according to the gaze of others. It is precisely within this tension that certain dissident and marginalized subjectivities have activated practices of reclaiming the agency of objects, with the aim of reactivating their biographies and transforming them into material testimonies against the regimes of oblivion imposed by dominant cultures. 
In many global contexts, a significant portion of circulating material culture can be understood as the residual outcome of colonial relations of interdependence. As contemporary African art and material culture scholar Clement Akpang argues, the exponential growth of waste within a context such as Nigeria over the past twenty years is itself a direct consequence of hyperconsumerism produced by colonial legacies – and it is precisely within these residues that some artists have discovered the most effective material and social metaphors through which to interrogate that inheritance. They have done so by appropriating them.

APPROPRIATION 

When political and artistic appropriations of certain objects take place, what is appropriated is also the agency embedded within them. A process of resignification is activated, transforming imposed biographies into new instruments of counter-narration: these practices of appropriation operate as forms of material resistance that deconstruct the power relations inscribed within objects, restoring to them a political function within processes of identity construction. To appropriate an object means to appropriate the projections and superstructures that generated it: it is an act of “subversion from within” that has historically been enacted through artistic, political, performative, and literary operations within contexts marked by imbalance and subordination. The Indian postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha understands appropriation as a form of anti-colonial resistance not merely as an act of “taking something” from the dominant culture, but also as the creation of a “third space” in which the culture of the colonized and that of the colonizer encounter one another through hybrid experiences and negotiated, transformed identities. Appropriating elements of hegemonic culture can never be configured as a neutral repetition; rather, it constitutes a process of rearticulation and resignification through one’s own experience. The result is a hybrid and composite form that destabilizes the notion of purity perpetuated by imperialism. The anti-colonial appropriator thus emerges as an entity capable of challenging the cultural and linguistic stability of the center, distorting old words or authoritarian materialities into new oppositional meanings. A commodity produced by the superstructures of the global economy can therefore become a subjective testimony, in which original classificatory logics are overturned and reinterpreted through diasporic routes, asymmetries of power, and subordinated gazes.
These practices of material reuse of objects and symbols from below generate dissident spaces that operate in the shadow of dominant structures and rework material culture. Employing geographical or economic residues becomes, in every sense, a challenge to urban rationality and to the logics of consumption that seek to subordinate every existence considered other or positioned at the margins of Euro-American, masculine, binary, and heteronormative culture. The act of reusing and recycling thus becomes a gesture of reclaiming the object’s agency, allowing for the recovery and reaffirmation of one’s social identity while challenging its subordination. When an artist moves a bottle cap, a cardboard package, a discarded weapon, a domestic tool, a commodity of desire, or an object stereotypically gendered or racialized from its assigned sphere into that of art, they are asserting the right to reclassify what the system had already classified on their behalf. 
In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986), Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that all things possess a biography that articulates their existence as both products and commodities of consumption. Within this dynamic, however, the movement from production to consumption is constantly regulated by a tension between what he calls “paths” – institutionalized trajectories – and “diversions” ‒ deviations. If the path represents the ideal trajectory, the socially regulated convention through which an object preserves a predetermined order (as in the case of land ownership, but also of gendered objects), Appadurai defines “diversion” as the event in which a social actor deliberately removes an object from its naturalized trajectory in order to reconnect it to a different system of exchange. For the anthropologist, this constitutes a deeply political act: a challenge to authority and a violation of the rules imposed by elites upon the circulation of things. A practice such as the artistic recycling of waste constitutes an act of critical reflection on the ways in which matter, rejected from the production cycle, returns to the social sphere in order to generate new relations. The residue, selected because it symbolizes the organization of power within dominant culture, is recycled and redefined through a critical agency within a social group where the gesture does not merely involve repair, but rather acts as a contestation of the “paths” of hegemonic culture. Matter becomes thoughtful: the recovery of what is invisible, what is socially discarded, what functions as a container without content, becomes a reflection of those submerged memories otherwise destined for erasure. Against the planned obsolescence of globalized consumerism, appropriation and critical reuse can assert themselves as an aesthetics of resistance.

REUSES AND RESIDUES IN HISTORY OF ART

As previously discussed, the artistic and political appropriation of discarded matter constitutes an act of resignification of what a hegemonic cultural system seeks to regulate and normalize. It is during certain historical moments of heightened identity and political consciousness, however, that this gesture became a conscious and widespread practice. In the United States during the 1960s, for instance, the Civil Rights Movement stimulated the emergence of artistic practices reflecting on African American identity and experience. In Los Angeles, after the Watts uprising of 1965, the use of discarded materials acquired a directly sculptural dimension. Here, artists such as Noah Purifoy, together with Judson Powell, collected the debris left behind by the clashes and created 66 Signs of Neon (1966), a series of assemblages in which glass, metal, and ash constitute the material residue of the uprising, transforming the object into a genuine archive of historical memory. Within the same context, artists such as John Outterbridge, associated with the Brockman Gallery, produced sculptures using rags, rubber, and metal scraps, reflecting on racial segregation and the systemic violence of lynching. These practices of critical reuse as a claim of Afro-descendant identity in the United States extend throughout the history of Black artistic practices during the years of Civil Rights affirmation, from the Spiral collective to the Black Arts Movement. This line of research reaches one of its most significant outcomes in the work of David Hammons, who initially employed his own body as a matrix in his body prints and later incorporated materials such as bones and hair into his assemblages ‒ materials traditionally racialized and stereotypically associated with African American communities. Through their relocation into the artistic sphere, Hammons overturns their meaning, transforming marginalized objects into instruments of cultural and political assertion. A second genealogy of critical reuse and material appropriation within the postcolonial artistic constellation develops in Nigeria during the 1990s around the Nsukka Group and is promoted by figures such as El Anatsui. As scholar Clement Akpang emphasizes, it would be incorrect to interpret these practices as a mere late derivation of European Dadaism or the ready-made. Contemporary engagement with recovered materials instead emerges from a specifically postcolonial context, marked by hyperconsumerism generated by economic dependency on the West, the trauma of decolonization, the Nigerian Civil War, and the persistence of neocolonial dynamics. Within this context emerges the research of El Anatsui, who between the late 1980s and early 1990s began working with the metal bottle caps found near his studio in Nsukka. The artist developed an assemblage technique in which the caps are stitched together with copper wire according to methods recalling Ghanaian kente weaving. Through this process, Anatsui creates a relationship between African textile traditions, the colonial history of alcohol trade, and the systems of circulation of waste produced by the West. His legacy has influenced numerous artists connected to the Nsukka School. Bright Ugochukwu Eke, through installations such as Acid Rain, addresses the issue of pollution in the Niger Delta, caused by multinational oil companies, using discarded plastic materials. Dilomprizulike, known as the “Junkman of Africa,” and Olu Amoda, instead, employ reclaimed materials to reflect on corruption, urban decay, and the loss of cultural traditions produced by Westernization. The two genealogies reconstructed here – the American one, born from the urgency of Civil Rights and from the materiality of the urban uprising, and the Nigerian one, rooted in a fully autonomous tradition of appropriation distinct from European modernism – do not directly communicate with one another, but they share the same conceptual gesture: both appropriate a residue and subject it to an action that charges it with a second meaning, superimposed upon its status as waste. It is precisely this gesture – poor matter becoming simultaneously document and denunciation – that prepares the ground for the following reflection on cardboard.

CARDBOARD: FROM DIASPORA TO CONTEMPORARY ART

Among the residues of globalized capitalism, cardboard emerges as one of the most emblematic materials. Cardboard seems to materialize within itself the contradictions of globalization and of the socio-economic superstructures that govern it: it is an ephemeral substance, ubiquitous within the non-places of global logistics, a form of pure passage. Cardboard is packaging, a container deprived of content, a transitional shell embodying the precariousness of an existence that moves along the margins of consumer economies and crosses the invisible flows of people and goods within trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic exchanges. In this sense, cardboard is a diasporic matter, as it preserves within itself a perpetual biographical condition of transit: it emerges as the signifier of an asymmetrical system of commodity circulation based on regimes of desirability and hyperconsumption. It embodies what British sociologist Paul Gilroy wrote in 1992 in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: Gilroy demonstrates how transatlantic routes contributed to Western economic and cultural supremacy, understanding forced diaspora as the very “engine” of Euro-American modernity itself. Within this framework, Gilroy reveals a “counter-modernity” that incorporates into historical narratives the routes of the slave trade, hybrid languages, Afro-diasporic culture, and all those elements displaced and obscured by Eurocentric narratives. Through the flows of a contemporary symbolic diaspora, cardboard describes the counter-history of a liquid present, distant from official narratives, in which it becomes the shell of capitalist desire, a protective skin for migrants, but also a shelter. Cardboard embodies the precariousness of an improvised refuge, carrying within itself traces of migrant geographies and forced circulations. From anonymous commercial packaging, cardboard is removed from the logic of consumption and transformed into a living surface, a survival device, and a material testimony of marginalized existences. In this perspective, the material accommodates the “bodies of waste” produced by globalization, making tangible the profound inequalities that cross contemporary regimes of mobility. Cardboard as dwelling: a precarious, fluid, and stateless form of habitation constructed through practices of diversion and reappropriation of urban space. Transformed into emergency architecture, cardboard renders visible the material conditions of exclusion and precarious labour, while temporarily overturning the logics that regulate inhabitation. The use of cardboard by refugees, migrants, and unhoused people reactivates the material qualities of the medium as a practice of resistance and as a negotiation of the right to the city.
From a residue of global logistics, cardboard thus transforms into a material archive of contemporary diaspora, capable of making visible stories, bodies, and forms of life normally excluded from public space. It is therefore a transnational material, standardized throughout the world and perpetually in transit along those “paths” that organize its value. Precisely for this reason, it is designed to become a residue: discarded once its content has been revealed and its destination reached. It is an ephemeral and precarious material, born to be terminal, yet once abandoned it acquires, as previously discussed, an unprecedented force. It is dwelling, temporary architecture, protection, symbol, and, above all, a surface of inscription: it is the preferred material of the placard, of the banner that ignites public squares, of claims written from below. It is the place where what has been discarded can become a voice. This is why numerous dissident, grassroots, and political artistic practices have employed cardboard as the medium of their own practice.

CARDBOARD AS A MEDIUM: AN ANTHOLOGY

As we have seen, cardboard is already a material suspended between the ephemerality of the commodity and the necessity of dwelling, between the anonymity of global packaging and the voice of the handwritten placard. It is precisely this vocabulary that certain artists have employed in order to construct political and dissident counter-narratives, exposing the contradictions of colonial history, the fragility of inhabitation, and the ghosts of consumerism. It is the entrance into the realm of art of the very traces of diasporic precarity. Thus, a poor and terminal material becomes an artistic medium in its own right.
Within the artistic practice of the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, cardboard becomes the privileged medium for grassroots political action. Taring Padi was founded in Yogyakarta during the final years of Suharto’s New Order regime, formally establishing itself in 1998 as the People-Oriented Culture Institute and occupying spaces within the Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia during the height of the Reformasi movement. Its declared mission – to revive popular culture and build a united front for democratic change – translates into a practice in which art and activism merge into a single gesture: the collective becomes a laboratory of dissent where cultural production itself functions as a device of emancipation. Yet it is the choice of material, even before the figurative language, that makes this fusion between art and struggle concrete. Banners, flags, placards and above all the cardboard that supports them are not treated as neutral surfaces for images, but as performative and political platforms. At the core of Taring Padi’s practice lies the collective construction of wayang kardus, life-sized cardboard puppets conceived as performative tools during street protests. The cardboard wayang become symbolic multipliers of bodies in public space: they visually amplify crowds, construct a shared imaginary, and simultaneously function as possible shelters. The material is therefore not chosen merely because of economic necessity, but because it constitutes the conceptual core of the operation itself. The same fragility that makes cardboard accessible, lightweight, and infinitely reproducible allows Taring Padi to reinterpret the traditional theatrical form of Javanese wayang, transforming it into a horizontal, mobile, and immediately accessible device that anyone can construct. From waste to polyphonic medium, the wayang live through the energy of the streets: they deteriorate, are shared, and are regenerated for every new struggle.
Within Carlos Bunga’s artistic practice, cardboard becomes a fully-fledged constructive principle, capable of generating an entire architectural grammar founded on structural precariousness, suspended in a perpetual transition between demolition and construction. Raised in a family of Angolan refugees who settled within social housing on the outskirts of Porto, Bunga brings into this cycle of construction and collapse the experience of a form of dwelling never entirely guaranteed: homes inhabited with the awareness that they might be lost. In his work, cardboard does not merely allude abstractly to the fragility of contemporary inhabitation; rather, it reproduces within its own physical properties the material condition of those who have experienced housing as a precarious state. Beginning in the early 2000s, Bunga constructs full-scale environments by assembling corrugated cardboard panels with adhesive tape and subsequently covering them with industrial wall paint, through a process that closely imitates architectural construction techniques. Architecture – understood as stability, rootedness, and property – becomes an unstable and transitional process.

The Filipino artist couple Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan address, through a collective and collaborative practice, issues related to migration, diaspora, dwelling, displacement, and family bonds. Beginning from a personal experience of migration, the duo has developed over the years an entire body of work composed of increasingly large-scale installations, often constructed together with entire communities of students and migrants who are invited to assemble miniature dwelling ecosystems using cardboard boxes. The transience of global mobility, stateless identity, and the necessity of establishing oneself within a community become conceptual devices through which the artwork is collectively constructed. 
Throughout his life, Bahamian artist John Beadle has employed poor materials and “junk” as reflections of Afro-Caribbean migratory routes and as resignifications of colonial heritage. Beadle emerged as an artist within the “shacks,” the workshop-barracks where, every year, the costumes of Junkanoo are collectively produced: the great Afro-Bahamian procession that originated under slavery as a moment of liberation during festive celebrations. His origins as a Junkanoo artist led him to develop a practice grounded in discarded materials and collaboration. Compositions, collages, silhouettes, and ephemeral structures entirely made from carved reclaimed cardboard emerge directly from the context of Junkanoo parades, oscillating between memory and cultural resistance. In this sense, the material constitutes the skeleton of a collective practice of masking, while simultaneously concealing the ghosts of the Afro-Caribbean slave diaspora.

Sohrab Hura was born in West Bengal and established himself as an artist in Delhi, India, where he began experimenting with photography by engaging with violence, contradictions, and distortions of reality within contemporary society themes that, from the beginning, he approached by moving away from the desire for a linear narrative. In recent years, he has expanded his practice through painting on unconventional supports. It is within this framework that the series Timelines emerges, in which Hura paints with acrylic and chalk directly onto the cardboard boxes he used to ship his self-published photobooks. The same anonymous packaging designed to contain commodities during transportation becomes a surface upon which portraits, landscapes, and fragments of familial and political memory are deposited. Each box can be opened, closed, and reassembled with others into ever-changing configurations, so that the “timelines” referenced in the title – crossing people, places, events, and even minimal details – never unfold according to a fixed sequence. Instead, they remain recombinable, literally foldable, following the same logic as the material that supports them. The containing box becomes, now, the content of a counter-archive that escapes genealogies and testifies to the possibility of historical resignification.
The practices reconstructed here – from Taring Padi’s wayang kardus to Carlos Bunga’s unstable architectures, from Sohrab Hura’s painted boxes to Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan’s miniature villages – do not, naturally, exhaust the repertoire of a material that continues to be reinvented and rediscovered for its possibilities. What unites these distant practices is the repeated and independent discovery of the same property of cardboard: its capacity to exist at the margins – as waste, packaging, container, transit, and endpoint – while at the same time actively bearing witness to them, appearing as shelter, archive, political surface, home, body, and memory.
Significantly, this same conceptual flexibility can today be identified not only within artistic practices, but also within exhibition-making itself. Visitors to the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale – In Minor Keys ‒ the final curatorial vision conceived by Koyo Kouoh and brought to completion by her team after her passing in 2025 – encounter an entire exhibition infrastructure constructed from cardboard. Designed by the South African studio Wolff Architects, the exhibition display is characterized by exposed pressed cardboard, deliberately left uncovered and untreated: an architectural translation of the same ecological, political, and relational intuition that animates the curatorial project. It represents a countercurrent choice, distant from the logic of high-impact consumption that often characterizes the ephemeral architectures employed in large-scale exhibitions. Cardboard becomes a political and infrastructural technology, realized through an ethos of intimate and transcultural ecology. From the material of diaspora to the Venice Biennale, cardboard carries with it the history of what it has endured and of those who have given it new meaning.

Niccolò Freri

The text has been translated in English using AI