Discs of the Sun

Discs of the Sun investigates Lomé's informal markets through multi-scale research combining aerial photography, material analysis, and ground-level , transforming everyday survival architectures into critical questions about climate adaptation

Constructed from second-hand clothing textiles imported from the Global North and locally reassembled become geometric abstractions. Pastel circles against sand create patterns that recall modernist painting, yet these "discs" are technologies protecting 150,000 vendors working 12-hour days in 28-35°C equatorial heat for €8-20 daily wages.

The umbrellas embody global circulations of waste and labor: discarded European and North American clothing shipped to West Africa as "aid," sorted by informal workers, cut, and stitched into new forms. The project traces this material journey through multiple scales of investigation. Ground-level documentation reveals umbrella construction techniques, patchwork assemblies of five to eight different textile fragments, hand-stitched using local repair knowledge, reinforced through daily use and constant mending. Material samples collected and archived as specimens show clothing labels from Manchester, Hamburg, New York transformed into shade architectures. Each umbrella is unique assemblage: a German striped shirt becomes structural panel, an American floral dress becomes decorative section, a French cotton becomes waterproof layer. This transformation reveals not generic "African resilience" but specific technical knowledge, which textiles hold tension, which absorb vs. reflect heat, which stitching patterns distribute stress across heterogeneous materials. The informal workers who sort secondhand clothing bundles, the tailors who cut and assemble umbrellas, the vendors who repair them nightly, this is collective technical labor rarely recognized as such.

The umbrellas embody global circulations of waste and labor: discarded European and North American clothing shipped to West Africa as "aid," sorted by informal workers, cut, and stitched into new forms. This transformation reveals how the Global South adapts Northern waste into survival tools not resilience to celebrate uncritically, but adaptation forced by systemic inequality and climate crisis. The project examines this circular economy where materials, bodies, and capital flow through networks shaped by colonial histories and contemporary precarity.