Dyptich of Collages

An Ordinary Day in the Urban Centre / A Busy Day in the Rural Area

Context

Independent Project during the Artist Residency at 32 Degrees East

Location

Nakivale Refugee Settlement & Kampala, Uganda

Year

2025 & 2026

Materials

Synthetic Image, Photography

This diptych of collages is part of the larger research-based project The Construct(ion) of Home, which investigates how displacement, settlement, and everyday life intersect within refugee contexts. The work emerges from a critical response to dominant Western media imagery that reduces refugee camps to sites of passive suffering, often overlooking their complexity, agency, and vitality. Focusing on Nakivale Refugee Settlement—established in 1958 and now functioning as a dense, evolving urban environment—the diptych highlights a long-standing “urban–rural” divide that has been central to architectural and urban discourse since the industrial era. On one side, the collages draw from the settlement’s urban centres: areas shaped by decades of social and economic activity, where informal businesses, local markets, and transnational networks produce a vibrant, lived-in cityscape. On the other side, the work reflects the peripheral zones inhabited by so-called “new arrivals,” where provisional shelters mark the beginning of processes of home-making, adaptation, and survival. Visually, the compositions are influenced by the dense, detail-rich structure of Wimmelbücher (German for “busy picture books”), inviting viewers to navigate layered scenes filled with simultaneous narratives and micro-events. This approach is combined with a formal reference to the large-scale, high-resolution photographic works of Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, whose images capture the complexity of contemporary life through scale and accumulation. By juxtaposing these two spatial and temporal conditions, the diptych challenges reductive visual tropes and instead foregrounds the multiplicity of lived experiences within Nakivale. It proposes the refugee settlement not as a static site of crisis, but as an active, socially and economically dynamic environment—one in which “home” is continuously constructed, negotiated, and reimagined.