Rafael has a sustained preoccupation of working with junk material. He is known for his association with the Transforming Arms into Tools project (TAE), where arms are swapped for useful objects like farming equipment or sewing machines. His process of work involves transforming the decommissioned weapons from the Mozambique civil war, which lasted from 1976 to 1992, into sculptures.

As an artist who grew up in the midst of violence, Rafael’s presence in the Khoj Kasheer workshop assumed a fitting participation as how he would address the given context. However, he could not find the arms or the weapons to transform and instead, decided to make a sculpture of a wild goat. In Absentia, the skeleton of the goat, made out of copper wire and covered with a rubber doormat, is perforated with the shoe prints, giving it a sense of volume, movement and transparency. The sculpture is left hanging and swinging on a seesaw made out of the rubber doormat.