In 2023, I began the Homecoming series, holding interventions across various vulcaniser shops with the idea that these shops could be exhibition sites, introducing the vulcanisers to my work, which involved found materials I had sourced from their very shops; but they had never seen these finished artworks. Around that time I was speaking to Nuna Doe, founder of Compound House Gallery, about the interventions I had been having in vulcaniser shops, and he spoke to this idea of gifting shops with works, which echoed the logic and sentiments of some of the vulcanisers I visited who always asked whether I would be leaving the works behind.

This idea of a gift is something I have heard Ibrahim Mahama speak of, referencing the famed lecturer at KNUST, Prof. kąrî’kạchä seid’ou.¹ Though I am not a product of KNUST, seid’ou’s Emancipatory Art Teaching Project has been a significant influence on my thinking. Launched in 2003, the project dismantled the British-derived fine arts curriculum at KNUST and transformed art practice from a commodity into a gift, training artists to be indifferent to specific media, to choose whatever materials best served the context, and to take the exhibition out of the gallery and into the city itself.² Its ethos, the gown must go to town, drawn from Kwame Nkrumah’s 1963 speech “The African Genius,” pushed academia toward the local community, toward public space, toward socio-political histories.³ It is within this broader current of thinking, even if at a remove from the institution itself, that my practice finds some of its grounding. The vulcaniser shop as exhibition site, the work as gift, the refusal to wait for gallery walls: these are not coincidental alignments.

But what is a gift, and how does this gift play out? How can this work be a gift? How can it be non-extractive, in that it wasn’t just about going to purchase objects from these shops, or documenting their spaces and creating new objects that never returned to these places, but ended up in the Western world, far away from the shops I acquired these histories and objects from? Around the same time in 2023, I had been experimenting with some paintings that bore the idea of signage but with names inspired by trotro slogans, a fusion of fictional vulcaniser imagery coupled with the slogans from vehicles who stopped by for fixing. I held interventions in certain shops with these works. However, what I kept coming to was the idea of the gift, what work truly embodies not fiction, but their labour and identity; and that could remain in these shops.

The following year in 2024, when I began building a photographic archive of all shops throughout Accra, called Vulcaniser Archive, I made the observation that many shops I visited were empty when I arrived and there wasn’t a way to contact the vulcaniser. In many cases people around the shop didn’t even have the attendant’s number. Imagine you were me and your tyre was flat and in need of repair. Whiles working on this I had become increasingly moved by the work of On Kawara, not just the aesthetics of his profound date paintings but his philosophy in capturing the then-now which becomes significant in the future.⁴ How is a newspaper clipping today, an event that happened today, relevant tomorrow? How is a shop photographed today which closes tomorrow or in five years due to road construction, stay relevant? Does the simple identity of a phone number as an ID unique to a vulcaniser and his place matter to onlookers and people in need of tyre repair?

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In 1968, On Kawara began his I Went series, a daily practice of mapping his movements through cities, tracing on street maps the routes he had walked that day and mailing them to friends and fellow artists.⁵ The gesture was simple and almost bureaucratic: I was here, I moved through here, here is the evidence. What interested me was not just the cartography but the philosophy behind it, the idea that presence, even fleeting was worth recording. That the act of going somewhere constituted a kind of meaning. The Vulcaniser Atlas is, in one sense, my version of I Went, a record of where I have been, which shops I entered, what I encountered, what was empty, what intrigued me. But where Kawara went and traced, I went and left behind. The Atlas records the going. The Portrait of a Vulcaniser as Signage is what remains after I have left the shop. Together they form a single gesture: I went, and I did not leave empty-handed, and neither did they.

What kept returning to me was the absence I had encountered in some shops, no number on the wall, no way to reach the person who worked there. And yet the signage that already existed in other spaces was doing something important: names scratched into walls, phone numbers painted onto electricity poles, words on scraps of wood propped against tyres. And in one shop, a laminated sheet bearing the exact text of the signage gift, one that wasn't there during my previous visits. This was already a language of identity, of I am here, I can be found. The gift, then, couldn’t be a painting that aestheticised the shop or a photograph that documented and left. It had to be something that functioned within the logic of the space itself, that spoke the same visual language the vulcaniser already spoke, that carried his name and his number, that guided someone with a flat tyre the same way a hand-painted sign would. A work that didn’t announce itself as art but simply remained, useful and present, after I had left the shop. That is what Portrait of a Vulcaniser as Signage (2026—) is.

The longer ambition behind this project is the idea of an experimental museum, a permanent collection of works distributed across multiple vulcaniser shops, with no fixed walls and no single address. Each shop that holds a work or has been a site of intervention is reflected on the Vulcaniser Atlas, marked in purple. These purple markers are the museum’s floor plan. They record where the artist has been, what was left behind, and where a permanent work now lives alongside the daily labour of tyre repair. The collection grows as the interventions continue, and the Atlas grows with it, a map that is also an index, a document that is also an institution.⁶

This permanent intervention project (2026—) was made possible thanks to the Prince Claus Fund, of which I became a Fellow in 2026. And the Vulcaniser Atlas lives on and can be accessed via my studio website: www.afrobutylism.com

Notes

¹ Prof. kąrî’kạchä seid’ou is an artist-intellectual and professor in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at KNUST, Kumasi.

² kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, “On Emancipation, Freedom and Art,” Thresholds 47 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). See also the blaxTARLINES KUMASI incubator, which grew directly from the Emancipatory Art Teaching Project as a platform for contemporary and post-contemporary art in West Africa.

³ Kwame Nkrumah, “The African Genius,” speech delivered at the opening of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, 25 October 1963. Reprinted in Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (London: Panaf Books, 1973).

⁴ On Kawara’s Today series (1966–2013) consists of date paintings made on the day they represent, often accompanied by newspaper clippings from that same day. See Jonathan Watkins, On Kawara (London: Phaidon, 2002); and Alexander Alberro, “Reductivism in Reverse,” in On Kawara: Silence, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015), 17–41.

⁵ On Kawara, I Went (1968–79). Each work in the series consisted of a city map on which Kawara traced his route for that day in red ink. See Alberro, “Reductivism in Reverse,” 28–30.

⁶ The concept of a distributed, non-institutional museum finds precedent in practices such as Theaster Gates’s model of cultural infrastructure embedded within communities. See Theaster Gates, The Black Image Corporation (London: Phaidon, 2019). For the theoretical framing of the artist-run institution, see also Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Open Editions, 2010).

Dela Anyah is an artist and researcher based in Accra, Ghana, working across sculpture, photography, mapping, and archival research. His practice is grounded in the contemporary history of the tyre industry: its global trade, labour networks, waste and migration patterns. His essays and research have appeared in Thresholds (MIT Press), Adjacent (NYU ITP), Log Journal and LIMN Magazine. He is a 2026 Building Beyond Fellow of the Prince Claus Fund and his works are held in the Celine Art Project, Sir David Adjaye Collection, and Fischer Shull Collection.

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The Vulcaniser Archive is a long-term photographic and research project documenting the spaces of repair that sustain Ghana’s mobility. These workshops—often overlooked yet essential—hold stories of transformation, invention, and endurance. What began as documentation of vulcaniser shops whilst sourcing discarded materials for artwork has evolved into a living record of informal labour, urban precarity, and the ingenuity embedded in Ghana’s roadside economies.

The Disappearing Workshop

Vulcaniser shops—places where tyre repairs are carried out—exist in varying states of permanence. Some workshops are temporary, erected quickly and informally, and sometimes disappear just as fast due to shifts in land ownership, urban development, or regulatory crackdowns. These informal workspaces are crucial to urban life, especially in rapidly developing areas where infrastructure and traffic demand regular tyre maintenance. Yet many of these spaces remain fragile and transitory, often moving or disappearing without notice.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 2 billion people work informally globally, with approximately 80% of the Ghanaian workforce employed in the informal economy. Ghana’s informal economy is estimated at 35.9% of GDP. These vulcaniser shops are part of this vast network of informal labour—critical nodes where tyre repair and waste converge.

The scale of global tyre waste is staggering. A 2025 study published in the journal Waste Management found that in 2021, 1.5 billion waste tyres were generated globally, with an expected 4.3% annual increase. According to research from the Tire Industry Project, a billion end-of-life tyres are generated every year, with four billion such tyres currently in landfills and stockpiles worldwide. In African contexts, where formal waste management systems are often limited, these informal repair spaces become critical sites where tyre waste accumulates after road users abandon damaged tyres following repairs.

Since 2022, I have been documenting these spaces. This collection of recordings and photographs has grown into the Vulcaniser Archive—an account of labour, transformation, and the precarious existence of these workshops.

A Catalyst Moment

In 2023, I witnessed the eviction of several vulcaniser shops in Ashiyie, a suburban town in Greater Accra Region, as part of a highway expansion project. These shops had been operating on government land along the roadside and were cleared to make way for new development. In 2025, I noticed the same pattern on the Tema Motorway, where shops previously documented were displaced due to highway expansion.

These erasures made visible what had always been true: many vulcaniser shops occupy liminal spaces in the urban landscape—essential yet expendable, visible yet ignored.

Building a Living Archive

The Vulcaniser Archive forms part of a broader inquiry into informal labour, vernacular architecture, material afterlives, and post-industrial ecologies, documenting the locations, movements, and shifting positions of tyre waste and repair sites across Ghana. The archive traces how these workshops serve as convergence points where mobility, waste, and labour intersect—spaces where road users bring damaged tyres for repair and abandon them afterwards, transforming vulcaniser shops into informal disposal sites where waste accumulates alongside the work of repair.

Conclusion: Documenting What Development Erases

The Vulcaniser Archive is an act of counter-documentation—a deliberate record of spaces that urban planning renders invisible and development routinely erases. As Ghana’s cities expand and highways widen, these workshops disappear without acknowledgment, taking with them decades of repair knowledge, informal apprenticeship networks, and the physical accumulation of abandoned tyre waste that marks these sites.

This archive insists on their presence. It maps their locations before they vanish, photographs their architecture before demolition, and records the labour that occurs within them before displacement. In documenting these sites where tyre repair and waste disposal converge, the archive reveals what formal economies depend upon yet refuse to recognise: the informal workers who keep Ghana moving, the transient spaces that absorb what road users abandon, and the ingenuity that sustains mobility while managing the material consequences left behind.

The vulcaniser shops may be temporary, but their contribution to Ghana’s urban life is not. This archive ensures they are remembered.

All photographs by Dela Anyah, courtesy of Afrobutylism Studio (Ghana).

In Ghana’s agricultural trade networks, woven baskets serve as the primary vessels for transporting goods from rural farms to urban centers and local communities. These baskets, marked with spray-painted numbers or farm logos, carry produce—yams, plantains, cassava, tomatoes, and countless other goods—through various supply chains.

But what fascinated me was a revealing cycle of utility and disposal that happens everywhere from major markets to small local shops. Upon arrival at their destinations—whether large markets, neighborhood stores, or kenkey sellers’ stalls—these transport baskets often become expendable. Their utility expires with delivery. Many are discarded entirely, left to deteriorate, while others find second lives as containers for different goods, their original farm markings becoming palimpsests of previous economic transactions.

I’ve gathered the baskets for my installation from various sources: small local shops within communities, kenkey sellers who had transported tomatoes to make pepper for sale, neighborhood vendors. This dispersed pattern of basket use and discard reveals how widespread this cycle is—it’s not confined to major markets but happens throughout Ghana’s commercial ecosystem, from the largest trading centers to the smallest corner shops.

From Vulcanizer Shop to My Studio: Seeing Value in Waste

My Inner Tube Market installation begins with my regular visits to vulcanizer shops around Accra. In these spaces, discarded inner tubes accumulate as automotive waste—punctured, patched multiple times, finally deemed beyond repair. To the vulcanizer, these tubes exist in a liminal state: no longer functional, not yet disposed of, simply occupying space as materials awaiting final discard.

But I see something different in these accumulations. Where vulcanizer shops see waste, I perceive potential commodities. This shift in perspective became the foundation of my installation. When I gather these tubes from the shops, I’m already beginning the process of transformation—moving them from a context of disposal toward a context of possibility.

The act of collection itself becomes a form of curation. I’m selecting from the accumulated waste of vulcanizer shops those tubes that will be transformed from automotive debris into market commodities. This selection process mirrors how farmers choose which produce to bring to market, or how traders decide which goods deserve prominent display in their stalls.

Creating My Inner Tube Market

Once I’ve gathered the tubes, I place them within discarded transport baskets that I’ve also collected—those same baskets that once carried farm goods to market before being discarded themselves. This creates a direct parallel to how agricultural produce is displayed in Ghana’s markets. Just as tomatoes, yams, or plantains are arranged in baskets to signal their availability for trade, I present the inner tubes using identical spatial logic.

My installation asks: what happens when we apply the visual and commercial language of the market to objects typically excluded from economic consideration?

This positioning represents a complete transformation in the tubes’ social status—from waste accumulating in vulcanizer shops to commodities worthy of market presentation and potential purchase. It’s not merely aesthetic but fundamentally economic, challenging the arbitrary boundaries between valuable commodity and worthless waste.

Why Market Logic Matters in My Practice

Ghana’s commercial spaces—from large markets to small neighborhood shops—operate on principles of display, accessibility, and social exchange. The presentation of goods in baskets signals their availability for negotiation and purchase, whether at a major market stall or a kenkey seller’s corner store. The basket becomes both container and advertisement, both functional tool and economic statement.

My Inner Tube Market adopts this same logic that operates throughout these various commercial spaces. The discarded baskets I’ve gathered from local shops and vendors, marked with fading farm logos and bearing the wear patterns of their transport and use, become the display mechanism for another category of discarded object. This creates multiple layers of meaning:

Double Discard: Both my containers (baskets) and my commodities (inner tubes) are objects that have been deemed worthless by their previous economic contexts, yet I reposition them as a complete commercial unit.

Cultural Translation: I use familiar market vocabulary—the basket-as-display-container—to present unfamiliar commodities, making the invisible visible through established commercial practices.

Value Proposition: By positioning tubes as purchasable commodities rather than waste, my installation suggests that value is not inherent in objects but rather socially constructed through presentation, context, and cultural agreement.

Weaving as My Foundation

The fact that my broader artistic practice involves weaving inner tubes into tapestries adds crucial conceptual depth to this installation. When I weave discarded inner tubes using traditional techniques, I’m engaging in a form of cultural and economic transformation—taking worthless industrial waste and working with it through processes that reference valuable cultural practices.

Weaving has been a traditional skill in Ghana for generations, particularly among the Gurune people of northern Ghana, with basket weaving done mostly by women to supplement subsistence farmers’ incomes. By applying these traditional weaving techniques to industrial waste, I’m bridging cultural knowledge systems with contemporary material challenges.

My installation thus presents two moments in the life of inner tubes: first as raw materials positioned for market exchange (demonstrating their potential for commodification), and elsewhere in my practice as woven tapestries (demonstrating their potential for cultural transformation). The baskets serve as both inspiration for my weaving technique and display containers for the unchanged tubes.

An Alternative Economy

The Inner Tube Market attempts a straightforward application of market logic to non-market objects. In doing so, it raises several questions that inform my practice:

Visibility: Waste typically operates through invisibility—we discard objects by removing them from view and consideration. Markets, by contrast, operate through hypervisibility. By making waste visible through market presentation, I force engagement with materials we normally ignore.

Exchange Value: Markets create value through the possibility of exchange. By positioning tubes as available for purchase, I suggest that waste objects might possess latent economic potential that our current systems fail to recognize.

Cultural Authority: Ghana’s commercial spaces—from markets to local shops—carry cultural authority as sites of legitimate economic activity. By borrowing this authority, I lend legitimacy to waste objects, suggesting they deserve the same consideration given to traditional produce and goods.

What I’m Really Proposing

My Inner Tube Market doesn’t simply critique waste or celebrate recycling. Instead, I’m proposing an alternative economic model where waste streams become commodity flows. The installation suggests that with different systems of display, different contexts of presentation, and different cultural frameworks of value, discarded objects could participate in economic circulation rather than economic exclusion.

This proposition feels particularly relevant within the Ghanaian context, where informal commercial spaces and creative reuse already demonstrate alternative approaches to value creation—from major markets to the smallest neighborhood vendor. My installation builds on these existing practices while extending their logic to materials typically excluded from economic consideration.

The installation’s title becomes my thesis: this is indeed a market for inner tubes, a place where these discarded objects are positioned as purchasable commodities rather than worthless waste. Through this simple but radical repositioning, my work reveals how arbitrary our distinctions between valuable and valueless objects truly are, while honoring the cultural wisdom embedded in Ghana’s commercial practices at every scale—from the kenkey seller reusing a tomato basket to the market vendor displaying fresh produce.

Conclusion: Inviting a Different Way of Seeing

When I place waste within the containers and contexts typically reserved for valuable goods, I’m suggesting that value itself might be more fluid, more socially constructed, and more subject to creative intervention than our economic systems typically acknowledge.

What I’m trying to capture with the Inner Tube Market is this idea: that we might see waste as commodity simply by treating it as such. Not through argument or didactic messaging, but through direct action—actually presenting waste as commodity, actually using market display techniques, actually positioning discarded objects within the frameworks we use for valuable goods.

This is my attempt at showing how we might see differently, value differently, and imagine economies that recognize potential where others see only problems. Whether it works or not, I hope it invites viewers to question why we discard what we discard, and what might change if we simply repositioned those same objects within different contexts of value.

When I first walked into vulcaniser shops across Accra—from East Legon to Ashiyie, from Tema Motorway to Kwabenya—to source discarded tubes, tires, and rims for my artwork, I encountered the same puzzled question repeatedly: "wo de ko ye den?" (what are you going to do with this?). This simple inquiry, born from genuine curiosity about the artistic potential of automotive refuse, would eventually evolve into "Homecoming," my series of interventions that challenges our understanding of where art belongs and who gets to encounter it.

What began as material sourcing transformed into something far more profound: the temporary conversion of working vulcaniser shops into exhibition spaces, creating unprecedented dialogues between myself, my artwork, shop owners, and local communities. This practice raises fundamental questions about the democratization of art, the politics of space, and the potential for utilitarian environments to become sites of cultural exchange.

The Vulcaniser Shop as Vernacular Space

Vulcaniser shops occupy a unique position in Ghana's urban landscape. These informal automotive repair spaces, primarily focused on tire repair and maintenance, represent more than mere commercial enterprises—they function as community nodes, gathering places, and repositories of local knowledge and craft. In his seminal work "Architecture Without Architects," Bernard Rudofsky emphasized the significance of vernacular spaces that emerge organically from community needs rather than institutional planning. The vulcaniser shops I work with embody this principle perfectly, existing as utilitarian spaces that nonetheless foster social interaction and economic activity within their neighborhoods.

My transformation of these spaces into temporary galleries echoes what cultural theorist Michel de Certeau described as "spatial practices"—the ways in which people appropriate and redefine spaces through their actions and presence. By introducing my artwork into vulcaniser shops, I was not merely changing the function of these spaces temporarily; I was revealing their latent potential as sites of cultural production and dialogue.

Alternative Exhibition Models and Community Engagement

My practice aligns with a broader movement in contemporary art that seeks to decentralize cultural production and challenge the hegemony of traditional art institutions. This approach resonates with Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of "relational aesthetics," which emphasizes art practices that focus on human relations and social contexts rather than independent private spaces.

The precedent for such community-based interventions can be traced through various international examples. In the 1970s, artists like Gordon Matta-Clark transformed abandoned buildings into temporary exhibition spaces, while more recently, initiatives like Theaster Gates's "Stony Island Arts Bank" in Chicago have demonstrated the power of converting utilitarian buildings into cultural spaces. However, my approach is distinctive in its temporary nature and its focus on active, working spaces rather than abandoned or repurposed buildings.

My "Homecoming" series particularly resonates with what curator and theorist Claire Bishop describes as "participatory art"—practices that invite direct engagement from communities rather than passive observation. The conversations I documented between myself and shop owners during these interventions become part of the artwork itself, creating what Grant Kester calls "dialogical art practices" that prioritize exchange and relationship-building over object-making.

The Politics of Accessibility and Art's Geography

Traditional art institutions—museums, galleries, and cultural centers—often present barriers to access that extend beyond mere economic considerations. Cultural capital, educational background, social class, and geographic location all influence who feels welcome in these spaces. Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of cultural reproduction helps explain how certain spaces become coded as belonging to specific social groups, effectively excluding others through invisible but powerful social mechanisms.

By bringing my art directly into vulcaniser shops, I bypass these institutional barriers entirely. My interventions create what anthropologist James Scott might call "hidden transcripts" of cultural exchange—interactions and dialogues that occur outside the purview of formal cultural institutions. Shop owners and community members encounter my contemporary art on their own terms, in spaces where they already feel comfortable and empowered.

This approach also speaks to what geographer Doreen Massey called "the politics of place." Every location carries its own social meanings, power relations, and cultural associations. The vulcaniser shop, as a working-class, informal sector space, brings different associations and possibilities to the encounter with art than would a white-walled gallery or museum space.

Material Circulation and Narrative Ecology

One of the most compelling aspects of my practice is the circular relationship between the spaces and the materials I use in my artwork. The discarded tires, tubes, and automotive materials I source from vulcaniser shops are transformed into art objects, which then return to their spaces of origin for exhibition. This creates what I call a "narrative ecology"—a system in which materials, spaces, and stories circulate and transform each other.

This approach echoes the work of artists like El Anatsui, whose transformation of discarded bottle caps into monumental sculptures speaks to questions of value, waste, and transformation in postcolonial African contexts. However, my practice adds another layer by returning the transformed materials to their original contexts, creating opportunities for shop owners and communities to see familiar objects through new lenses.

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" provides a useful framework for understanding my practice. While Benjamin was concerned with how reproduction diminishes art's "aura," my interventions might be seen as restoring a different kind of aura to everyday objects by returning them to their original contexts transformed through artistic practice.

Documenting Ephemeral Interventions

The temporary nature of my interventions raises important questions about documentation and memory in art practice. Each "Homecoming" exists for only a limited period—a day, a few hours—before the shop returns to its normal function. This ephemerality is both a strength and a challenge: it preserves the integrity of the working space while creating intense, focused moments of cultural exchange.

My documentation of these interventions through photography, video, and written accounts becomes crucial for extending their impact beyond the immediate community. Social media platforms, particularly Instagram, have played a significant role in amplifying the reach of my interventions, creating what curator Paul O'Neill calls "distributed curating"—curatorial practices that extend beyond physical spaces through digital networks.

However, this raises questions about representation and authenticity. How does the digital documentation of my interventions translate the embodied experience of encountering art in a vulcaniser shop? What aspects of the exchange between myself, my artwork, shop owners, and community can be conveyed through documentation, and what remains irreducibly local and temporal?

Building New Audiences and Cultural Networks

One of the most significant impacts of my "Homecoming" series has been its creation of new audiences for contemporary art. By bringing my work directly into communities that might never visit traditional art spaces, my interventions create opportunities for cultural exchange that would otherwise be impossible.

This approach aligns with recent scholarship on "cultural equity" and "cultural democracy"—movements that seek to ensure that cultural resources and opportunities are distributed more fairly across different communities and social groups. Rather than expecting communities to come to art, my practice brings art to communities, meeting people where they are rather than where institutions think they should be.

The feedback and engagement I received, particularly through social media responses to my Adjiringanor intervention, demonstrated the hunger that exists for these kinds of cultural encounters. The "proof of concept" that emerged from community engagement suggests that there are audiences for contemporary art that traditional institutions are simply not reaching.

Theoretical Implications: Expanding Exhibition Theory

My practice contributes to evolving theories of what constitutes an exhibition space and how curatorial practice might operate outside institutional frameworks. Traditional exhibition theory, rooted in museum and gallery practices, assumes certain conditions: controlled environments, dedicated viewing time, interpretive materials, and audiences who have specifically chosen to encounter art.

The vulcaniser shop exhibition disrupts all of these assumptions. The space continues its primary function during my intervention; viewers may encounter my artwork accidentally while seeking automotive services; interpretation occurs through direct dialogue rather than wall texts; and the environment is decidedly uncontrolled, with the sounds, smells, and activities of automotive repair continuing throughout.

This suggests the need for new theoretical frameworks that can account for what I call "embedded exhibitions"—curatorial practices that work within and alongside existing spatial functions rather than requiring the suspension of normal activities. Such practices point toward more sustainable and less disruptive models of cultural intervention.

Global Context and Local Specificity

While my practice emerges from specific Ghanaian contexts, it resonates with global conversations about decolonizing cultural institutions and creating more inclusive models of cultural engagement. From the transformation of informal settlements in Latin American cities into cultural spaces to the use of barbershops as exhibition venues in African American communities, there is a growing international movement toward more democratic and accessible cultural practices.

However, the specific context of the Ghanaian vulcaniser shop—its role in the informal economy, its social function in urban communities, its relationship to automotive culture and mobility—gives my practice a distinctly local character. This specificity is crucial, as it prevents my practice from becoming merely a generic example of "community engagement" and instead roots it in particular social, economic, and cultural conditions.

Environmental and Economic Dimensions

My use of discarded automotive materials also speaks to broader questions about waste management and environmental responsibility in urban African contexts. Contrary to functioning as recycling centers, vulcaniser shops often serve as dumping grounds for tire waste that would otherwise be burned or discarded inappropriately. My practice involves salvaging materials from these dumping areas before they are destroyed, transforming what would become environmental hazards into cultural objects with new meaning and value.

This approach highlights the distinction between formal recycling systems and informal waste transformation practices. While vulcaniser shops may not intentionally recycle materials, they become unintentional repositories of potentially valuable waste. My artistic intervention in this process creates cultural value from materials destined for destruction, offering an alternative to the linear waste cycle that dominates automotive repair industries.

Future Implications and Scalability

The success of my "Homecoming" interventions raises questions about international scalability and cultural translation. Rather than expanding into other types of businesses locally, I am more interested in whether similar practices could emerge in vulcaniser shops or comparable automotive spaces in other cities around the world. Could this model of temporary intervention work in tire repair shops in Lagos, Nairobi, or Dakar? What about automotive repair spaces in Detroit, São Paulo, or Sharjah?

Such international expansion would require deep attention to local contexts, materials, and community dynamics. Each city has its own relationship to automotive culture, waste management, and informal economic spaces. The success of my Ghanaian interventions cannot be assumed to translate directly to other urban contexts, but the underlying principle—transforming waste into art and returning it to its community of origin—might offer frameworks for culturally specific adaptations in cities with similar automotive repair cultures.

Conclusion: Toward a More Democratic Geography of Art

My "Homecoming" series represents more than an exhibition strategy—it offers a vision of what a more democratic and accessible cultural landscape might look like. By transforming vulcaniser shops into temporary galleries, my project demonstrates that art's power lies not in its institutional context but in its capacity to generate dialogue, transform perception, and build relationships.

Perhaps most importantly, my "Homecoming" series reminds us that cultural production already exists everywhere—in the repair practices of vulcaniser shops, in the social interactions of urban communities, in the creative repurposing of industrial materials. My role as an artist becomes not the creation of culture from nothing, but the amplification and transformation of cultural processes that already exist.

As I continue to develop this practice, the vulcaniser shop stands as both literal and metaphorical space—a site where the discarded finds new life, where questions of value and meaning are negotiated through dialogue. In asking "wo de ko ye den?" the vulcaniser shop owners were not merely inquiring about the fate of their discarded materials—they were opening a space for cultural dialogue that would ultimately transform both my artwork and their communities in equal measure.

This essay explores the theoretical and practical implications of my community-based artistic interventions through the lens of my "Homecoming" series. Future research might examine similar practices across different cultural contexts and their impact on both artistic practice and community development.