Melle Smets & Joost van Onna – Turtle
Melle Smets and Joost van Onna followed the trail of discarded Western car parts and ended up in a place called Suame Magazine in Ghana. Together with the local mechanics they produced the first car to ever be exported from this region to the West.
Turtle 1 is a reflection on the industry that has been created around the waste of our consumer society. In Suame Magazine the scrap is processed and marketed by some 200.000 highly specialized artisans in 12.000 informal workshops. When even the King of Ghana visited Suame Magazine to see it with his own eyes, it was clear to the Ghanaian media that these European ‘benefactors’ will bring Ghana a car industry. Instead of bringing a car industry, Smets and Onna brought a proposal, based on Suame Magazine's informal economy, for Ghana to build up its own.
