The Home Stay Exhibitions
“Your home can be a museum for peace.” Jacques Nkinzingabo
The Home Stay Exhibitions is a collaborative action research project between myself, photographer Jacques Nkinzingabo and a group of young Rwandan photographers that explores visual peacebuilding strategies. Supported with mentoring by The Kigali Centre for Photography, the young photographers are producing photo stories that they will exhibit in their homes in the Nyabihu district of Rwanda, inviting in people from their community to come and see their work. Since the genocide in Rwanda many families have closed their doors to neighbours as communities have struggled to re-build trust. The Home Stay Exhibitions seek to re-open the doors using photography to share stories and start conversations that embed peace.
The Home Stay Exhibitions model was originally developed by Nkinzingabo and colleagues in 2018 when they started running photography workshops with young people living in Nyabihu district in a project called Learning for Change. Conducting collaborative research and reflection alongside a second iteration of The Home Stay Exhibitions during 2020-21 with Jacques Nkinzingabo and the young photographers we will develop the conceptual underpinnings of the model, document activities and investigate community perspectives on the Home Stay Exhibitions as a visual peace-building strategy and model. The aim is to build a case-study of a visual peace-building intervention that contributes to a new agenda for visual peace research.
The research process will be documented in three different submissions hosted by Arts Cabinet, a pluri-disciplinary research platform that functions as a space to experiment with different forms of artistic knowledge production. The research is part of Imaging Social Justice, an initiative of King’s College London Visual and Embodied Research Methodologies Network (VEM), that showcases five projects in which social scientists work with artists to explore complex research questions around societies’ tendency to marginalise certain population groups. Imaging Social Justice encompasses different modalities to make tangible human experiences of everyday violence and struggle for justice.