Materials With a History

El Anatsui, working in Nigeria, collects the aluminum caps and foil seals from liquor bottles, flattens them, and stitches them together one by one with copper wire. A single work can use thousands of these tiny metal scraps. Joined edge to edge, the stiff flattened metal becomes surprisingly flexible, so the whole sheet can bend, ripple, and fold the way woven cloth does. The material itself is never disguised. You can still see bottle caps and brand fragments if you look closely, so the history of what the material was stays visible inside the finished work.

That history is the point. Liquor was a major trade good brought into West Africa by European traders, part of a long exchange that reshaped local economies and diets. By building his hangings from the discarded caps of that liquor, Anatsui makes the material itself carry the memory of that trade, rather than illustrating it through a scene or a symbol. The work asks what it means that this is the object left behind: a cap, a seal, a piece of packaging, multiplied into something large and radiant.

Because the sheets ship flattened and get folded, draped, and hung fresh by museum staff at each venue, no two installations look identical, and Anatsui leaves those choices to the installer rather than fixing one final shape. That openness connects this topic to the unit's larger interest in art built as a system rather than a single fixed object, work that keeps getting reconceived depending on where and how it is shown.