Hugging the southern banks of the Congo River, Kinshasa is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the poorest countries in the world per GDP. For decades now, it has been home to vast mounds of industrial waste known locally as décharges pirates, open dumps that block drains, spark fires and spread cholera. A colonial hangover, cities like Kinshasa have become dumping grounds for superfluous production from the global north. But as waste heaps have grown, sending shadows across Kinshasa, so too has a groundswell for ingenious methods of transforming refuse into meaningful art and noise.
Fulu Miziki are a music collective that began turning trash into instruments in the 2000s, but they only started
