Pfumvudza

Living in Ruwa, a town 30 minutes’ drive from Harare, Gareth Nyandoro has been observing and documenting the everyday lives, and informal entrepreneurship of its residents in small to large-scale mixed-media drawings and installations, in his inimitable 'kuchecka- cheka' style influenced by etching techniques, paper-cutting, assemblage, and props.

The exhibition presents Nyandoro's personal engagement with the concept of 'pfumvudza' meaning early shoots, to bloom or thrive, and the name of the 2020 Zimbabwean government-sanctioned programme funded by the UN, advocating citizen self-sufficiency, to help mobilise, train and support families and small crop growers to implement conservation agriculture to restore, and renew the fertility of soil, to grow plots of maize, millet, and wheat to mitigate food insecurity and the decline of large-scale industrial production. 

Amidst other challenges on resources such as energy and water; climate change, hyperinflation, lockdowns, and post-pandemic life, are contexts highlighted in this corpus of new and recent works, capturing working-class Zimbabweans thinking about food sustainability, urban farming, economic migration within and outside of Zimbabwe, and resilience.