The Construct(ion) of Home

Context

Independent Storytelling Project during the Artist Residency at 32° East

Location

Kampala, Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Kyaka II Refugee Settlement, Uganda

Year

2025 (ongoing)

Materials

Mixed Media (Photography, Collage, Text, Video, Drawing, and more)

The Construct(ion) of Home is an evolving artistic research project exploring how the idea of home is constructed, experienced, and remembered under conditions of displacement and prolonged temporariness. The project approaches home simultaneously as a material construction and an intangible construct: a physical shelter or infrastructure, but also a space shaped by memory, relationships, routines, care, loss, and belonging. Situated within the context of a refugee settlement, the work examines the tension between environments designed and administered as temporary and the lived reality of displacement that may extend over many years. The project is developed through a collaborative and participatory artistic process, working with people affected by displacement rather than approaching them solely as subjects of documentation. Photography, experimental video, collage, text, sound, drawing, mapping, and storytelling are used as tools for conversation and shared exploration. The process focuses on everyday experiences, personal histories, domestic spaces, objects, gestures, and acts of care, moving beyond conventional documentary representations centred on crisis or spectacle. Collaboration and trust are integral to the methodology. Rather than extracting stories or images, the project seeks to create a space for dialogue and shared authorship, allowing participants to influence how their experiences are represented. The work remains intentionally open in form, potentially developing into a photographic series, moving-image work, installation, or hybrid spatial project. This openness reflects the project‘s central question: whether home can be understood not as a fixed place, but as something continuously constructed, negotiated, and carried across changing circumstances.