Allegory of Construction II
 2009
Mixed media
Site-specific installation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

Angolan artist António Ole creates location-specific installations using cast-off doors, corrugated sheet metal and other discarded papers and objects. His fascination with these materials arose from walking through the musseques (shanty towns) of his hometown Luanda. Ole noticed that the struggling inhabitants of the musseques routinely added scraps of blue plastic or other abandoned materials to aestheticize the walls of their homes. Over the years, Ole photographed these ramshackle buildings and other crumbling structures across Angola and created both intimate assemblages and large-scale installations that emphasize the beauty of small, disintegrating and unlikely objects. Here, the artist assembled discarded maps from Angola and materials from the junkyards of Washington, D.C., to form a cluster of "totems," towers of debris that honor the creative, constructive and aesthetic power residing within rejected things that litter and redefine our landscapes.



Allegory of Construction II (Original sketch)