There is also the gaze of our Italian photographer Leni Frau within the interesting contemporary art exhibition 'Ubuntu, Humanity and Environment' that opens on Saturday 3 February at the Ardhi Gallery in Langata, Nairobi.
The exhibition brings together works by African and European artists who share visions of "resilience, interaction with the drifts of humanity and the environment" with their personal ways of representing them.

Leni participates with a number of shots, three of which are previously unpublished, which are part of the reportage in the Dandora rubbish dump in the capital Nairobi, the largest and most degraded in Africa. During a day together with the women who collect rubbish by trade and live in conditions of total degradation, talking to them and photographing them in a natural way, walking with them in that terribly surreal landscape, amidst unbreathable air and conditions bordering on the human, the clichés of those who simply see the unjust are overturned.

Two of the significant images are part of the book 'Nairobi' published by OgZero, which won the 'Volterrani-Narrare il mondo' prize at the last edition of the Turin Book Fair, and were also included in the photo exhibition combined with the book's presentations in Kenya and Italy.
At the same time, the shots created a 'concept' of their own, an exhibition in the making that the photographer called 'No ghost women in Dandora'.
She herself explains what led her to portray the landfill women.

"The realism of the "waste pickers" strikes to the stomach and silences any form of easy good-naturedness or pietism even in good faith," says Leni. "The pickers are not "ghosts" as the media often define them, rather they want to be considered as workers, and they fight to be recognised as such, to have the rights that other workers have, just because they work in less degrading conditions.
This is the presentation of the exhibition:

"They call them 'the ghosts of Dandora'. They are not ghosts, they are women who work among the rubbish heaps of Africa's largest rubbish dump.  They do not want to disappear. They simply ask for dignity: they would like to have access to health services, to have a union to protect them.  This vision of theirs overturns the common thinking, especially in the West, that jobs like these should disappear along with the redevelopment of landfills. In the daily toil of these women there are all the contradictions of our society which, as is often the case, are more easily borne by them, like the weight of the sack of rubbish they carry every day.

"Ubuntu, Humanity and Environment" opens on Saturday, 3 February, at 4pm at the Ardhi Gallery (Ole Sangale Link Road) with a performance by the Mathare Kids Talent Hub. It will be on display for about a month, every day except Mondays, from 10am to 8pm. Admission to the opening with the performance is by Kes. 500