Stitching together discarded mobile phone keyboards to make art, Ivorian artist Mounou Desire Koffi hopes to raise awareness about pollution. “I wanted to contribute something new,” said the artist, whose work is on display in Abidjan until July. In his studio in Bingerville, near the Ivorian business capital, the 28-year-old describes himself as “young contemporary artist” who wants to stand out from the crowd. “I’ve been passionate about drawing since childhood. It was always me the teacher would send to the blackboard to illustrate lessons,” he says. When he decided he wanted to go to art school, his parents, who worked as farmers in southwestern Ivory Coast, had no idea what it was. His art teacher had to visit to persuade them to let him go. After graduating at the top of his class from the Abidjan Art School, he started looking for old mobile phone keyboards and screens on roadsides, in gutters and in rubbish tips. “Now I have a whole team that is paid according to the quality of what they turn up with,” he says. “I told them: ‘Stop throwing things away. Bring them to me and we can work with them.'”