INTERVIEW with Ntando Cele, by Laura Ginestar

You said that you have resisted addressing the topic you explore in Wasted Land, as a South African artist living and working in a Western context. May I ask you why?

Yes, that is a good starting point… I think this resistance stems from a struggle within myself about whether I even have the right to take part in the conversation. For me, the climate crisis feels very much like a white topic. I also found myself questioning, even making fun of, what someone like me, a Black artist living in Switzerland, could contribute to what seems to be the biggest topic of the white world. Moreover, I resisted engaging with the topic for a long time because I didn’t understand what my trepidation was about. In the end, Wasted Land is also about that , about the contradictions and discomfort I feel around both the conversation and the reality of the climate crisis.

What was the moment in which you decided to make the piece, then?

Mmm…I have to think about what I was going through… because all my work comes deeply from personal questions I ask myself. Making theatre is a way to decode the world, a way to keep myself from losing my mind a little bit. This piece came after a kind of personal crisis, during which I asked myself: Should I continue making work? What do I want to contribute? Am I actually really bringing something of value? So, in a way, this was me challenging myself saying: it is now or never. I also felt that I didn’t want to live with the regret of never having spoken about this topic.

When you decided to make this performance, that establishes multiple connections between colonialism and climate change, which were the first ones you needed to address? What felt more urgent to you?

That’s a very good question. I have to think about how the two came together… First of all, I live in Switzerland, and the future is something people talk about a lot there. There are many climate marches, for instance. Young people protest almost every month. But somehow, I felt disconnected from that conversation, and I kept wondering why. That disconnection came, again, from what I mentioned earlier, from a place of thinking: I’m already living a racialized life; I’m already constantly thinking about my context and how I fit into this picture. So it feels like extra work to care about a world that white people care about.

But when I started thinking about how I want to take care of the world, I found myself asking again: How can I be of service? How can I make a difference in the world? How can I connect people? How can I create more spaces that bring different voices together? How can more people feel connected, so that we all care about the climate? And that felt more important. So, I started doing research. I came across many images, even aesthetically striking ones. That is when I realized that aesthetics are important to me as well, even if I’m falling into the same trap of using beautiful images to talk about a painful topic. There is a contradiction there, but again, going back to who I am, as an artist and a person from South Africa, my way of understanding the world is shaped by ideas of connection, beauty, and celebration. It is almost romantic… the way I tend to frame things. And that is something I keep going back and forth on.

However, when I came across the concept of “waste colonialism”, that became a turning point for me. At first, it was just about the climate crisis, about waste, and the images I was seeing. But discovering waste colonialism led me to dig deeper, and it completely changed how I understood fast fashion. Suddenly, fast fashion became a much more personal and accessible way to approach the topic, especially because of how it connects to my everyday life. For example, living in Switzerland, we put clothes in donation boxes thinking we are helping. But I had no idea where those clothes actually go. When I followed the trail, I realized they often end up being dumped in Ghana, creating more problems instead of helping. That changed everything for me.

In this piece, you refer to the well-known phrase and movement led by Greta Thunberg, Fridays for Future, highlighting how the debates on climate change and ecology are being led by white institutions, organizations, and individuals, while non-Western voices are barely present. You then pose the question: “What future?” What do you mean by that question?

In Wasted Land, I’m asking that question (“What future?”) from the perspective of people who are already suffering, people who are living constantly in crisis, people “on the ground”. Because I know or I understand, from the background that I have, that when you are living from a place of just trying to be alive, the future is not a prominent topic. It is about living just from one day to another.

In Wasted Land, the metaphor is the people and the situation in Ghana. The clothes we send there, as donations, end up in what used to be the largest second hand clothing market in the world. That market burned down earlier this year, on January 2nd. So right now, it basically doesn’t exist. There have been a lot of relief efforts to support the sellers and their families because their entire area was destroyed.

While we were all watching the fires in Los Angeles and worrying about what was going on in the U.S., this was happening in Ghana and no one was talking about it. That, to me, already shows what we are looking to. 

So, when you are on the ground, in that kind of situation… What future do you have? And that is why imagining the future sometimes feels like such a Western idea. The ability to imagine a better tomorrow feels like a luxury.

Will these connections and reflections also shape the trajectory you are hosting at SPRING Academy? How do you plan to address the topic throughout the programme?

I think the way of addressing it will be to challenge us from this place of luxury, because I include myself in this topic. I would like to try as much as possible not to talk from an elevated position as if I have all the answers. Instead, I want to pose questions. Questions about the values that we claim to have about saving the world, and saving ourselves. And whether those values are truly about change, or simply about preserving the comfort and safety we already enjoy.

Lastly, a question I ask every interviewee: Why the stage, the theater, as the space to present Wasted Land and discuss everything that the piece addresses?

The stage for me is still one of the most magical spaces to expose taboos, to expose and dissect things that aren’t spoken outside of the stage. It’s one way to (I think I’ll use a term that one of my collaborators uses) to talk about the elephant in the room. I don’t know how much immediate change it makes, but for sure it makes us question together the way that we live. And that, sometimes, can be super violent and shocking, but also in a way that gives you time to reflect, laugh along.

Thank you very much for all the answers, and also for bringing up the fire disaster in Ghana. I was only aware of the wildfires in Los Angeles, which already reflects the critic you make with the piece.

(For those who also may not be familiar with the incident: while several wildfires were occurring in January 2025 in California, affecting the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, a major fire also broke out in Accra, Ghana. Thousands of traders were devastated after a blaze destroyed approximately two-thirds of Kantamanto Market, one of the biggest second hand markets in the world, which receives an estimated 15 million used garments from the Global North each week. You can consult different articles online about it).