Mounou Désiré Koffi

Mounou Desiré Koffi (1994), born from a farmers family in the South-West of Ivory Coast, stood out at a young age for his drawing and painting talent, which eventually landed him at the Academy of Fina Arts in Abidjan, where he graduated in painting. Already in his bachelor years, he picked up his fascination for recycling materials, notably mobile phone materials. 

He noted that vast numbers of old mobile phones were littering the streets of Abidjan, becoming dangerous waste for children to play with. So he started a project to give these phones a second life by integrating them into bright coloured pop art paintings about urban street life in Abidjan. Since then his exploration has taken him to different ways of expression, both in subjects and materials with one constant: the use of recycled mobile keypads. In that he expresses not only the concept of technological evolution, but also raises the accompanying issue of technological obsolescence and environmental pollution as well as other issues of our time.

By now he has not only raised awareness about the environmental pollution but also recycled many tens of thousands of mobile keypads in his works. He pays a team to gather the mobile phones from the streets in large quantities, whilst people in Abidjan increasingly deposit their old phones with the team for free. Similar projects are being considered in other African countries such as Benin, Mali of Guinea.