Nigeria is a country full of rich traditions, brilliant artists, and a long history of creativity. We have the Benin bronze sculptures, Yoruba adire prints, and Igbo masquerades, and much more to prove that our culture is alive. It shows up in our fashion, festivals, music, crafts, and everyday life.
But while the richness of our culture is undeniable, there’s a growing problem that affects all of us: waste.
Every day, we see used tyres dumped on roadsides, plastic bags clogging drainages, and trash piling up on street corners. The heat, the stench, the health risks remind us daily: how we treat our environment is catching up with us.
But what if we could do something different? What if we could harness that same creativity from our cultural past to tackle today’s environmental challenges? That’s precisely the vision driving the FREEE Art Residency Program.
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FREEE Recycle Limited, an integrated waste recycling and rubber manufacturing company in Nigeria,
Recognizing this problem, has launched a 5-week art residency to give young creatives the chance to turn waste into meaningful art. For five weeks, from July 28 to August 30, 2025, selected young artists enrolled in recognized Nigerian tertiary institutions will come together in Ibadan to explore Nigerian history and culture while working with recycled materials like rubber, steel, and fibre.
Aligned to the program’s theme of “Echoes of Reclamation: Rebuilding Heritage from Waste”, these students will create artworks that reimagine and retell stories from Nigeria’s past. Think of tyre scraps transformed into wall pieces with the patterns of ancient carvings or rubber turned into sculptures of forgotten legends.
We often treat waste and heritage as unrelated challenges, says Ifedolapo Runsewe, Managing Director of FREEE Recycle. This residency suggests otherwise: the things we discard may hold the power to reconnect us with what we’ve lost.
This residency is just one of many ways FREEE is helping solve Nigeria’s waste problem. The company has already recycled over 350,000 tyres and turned them into impactful products such as playgrounds, paving tiles, flip-flops, rubber mats, and even the trendy ÀJÀLÁ bag.
Offerings of the art residency program include studio space, expert mentorship, hands-on training, and cultural immersion. The residency will culminate in a public exhibition in Lagos, offering a unique opportunity to witness these transformative artworks firsthand and truly rethink the potential of waste.
While this first residency focuses on art, FREEE plans to go even further. The goal is to use the FREEE Residency Program as a platform to explore other areas like technology, education, and more, for sustainability and creativity to come together to make a lasting impact.
This is not just about art. It is a movement that shows how waste doesn’t always have to be discarded. It can be reused, reshaped, or even made into something beautiful.
This residency is a call to action: to see the value in what we throw away and imagine what it could become.
