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Threats to both creativity and freedom of expression are on the rise globally, with Africa as no exception. As a result, artists, journalists and human rights defenders are seeking out shelter or safer locations in order to escape harm. However, the support systems cur­rently in place predominantly relocate at­-risk African artists to Europe and North America, which poses an additional set of social, cultural and economic challenges. This brief summarises key findings and recom­mendations of a report that investigates the successes and challenges of devel­oping temporary shelter and relocation initiatives based in Africa.

Threats to both creativity and freedom of expression are on the rise globally, with Africa as no exception. As a result, artists, journalists and human rights defenders are seeking out shelter or safer locations in order to escape harm. However, the support systems currently in place predominantly relocate at-risk African artists to Europe and North America, which poses an additional set of social, cultural and economic challenges. This brief summarises key findings and recommendations of a report that investigates the successes and challenges of developing temporary shelter and relocation initiatives based in Africa.

Threats to both creativity and freedom of expression are on the rise globally, with Africa as no exception. As a result, artists, journalists and human rights defenders are seeking out shelter or safer locations in order to escape harm. However, the support systems currently in place predominantly relocate at-risk African artists to Europe and North America, which poses an additional set of social, cultural and economic challenges. This report thus attempts to understand the experiences of artists from African countries and investigates the successes and challenges of developing temporary shelter and relocation initiatives based on the continent. It is accompanied by a concise summary document.

This paper interrogates the wounds inflicted by the representation of the war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. The paper presents Kanyo, Love and Gang Kikome and Other Things We Left Behind, artistic works within the exhibition When We Return, as a staging ground to interrogate symbolic repair. Gang Kikome and Other Things We Left Behind is an artwork-as-archive of items that were used by the inhabitants of settlement camps during the war between the LRA and the GoU but that were left behind once the camps were disbanded. The objects are a materiality of humanitarian aid; the artwork presents these objects of assistance as cultural artefacts. Kanyo, Love is an artwork about the aftermath of war through an exploration of the courtship gifts received by former wives of the LRA. The work critiques the silencing of affect in the frozen-in-time narrative of forced marriage and abduction that are superimposed onto the women. Curating the work as a knowledge register adds artistic and curatorial knowledge to existing research, reporting and archives on the war. It inserts artwork in the voids within the heritagisation of Uganda’s conflict past.

The impacts of protracted displacement can be understood through the spatial and material afterlives of war. In the context of Northern Uganda, the experiences of conflict that are interpreted in memorialisation are often reflected of how governments and aid agencies administered life during war. This article examines leftover aid rations, archives, former displacement camp sites and even unmarked graves as evidence to better understand what happens when people try to return "to normal"after decades of war between the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army. It asks what narrative and material erasure implies for survivors who seek to create memorials to reflect on the war and have come to find that the past has been destroyed. Understanding how forgetting occurs, whether intentional or not, illuminates the difficulty of using archival material or artefacts as tools for remembrance projects. The article undertakes an examination of the everyday experiences of displacement and traces of aid assistance to show how memorial efforts can better make sense the past in the present.

In October 2017, Kara Blackmore explored the vital role art can play in developing and disseminating research to a variety of audiences and unveiled how researchers on the Politics of Return project and artists selected through the 32-degrees East residency would dialogue to create outputs on the issues presented. In this blogpost, Kara Blackmore and Nikissi Serumaga describe the process of selecting the three artists for the project.

A photo essay by Kara Blackmore on the "Understanding South Sudan: Questions of Knowledge and Representation" held at LSE on 30 November 2017. "Let this dialogue be merely a punctuation mark in the ongoing conversation around today's South Sudan and the broader crisis of representation in the cosmopolitan era." -Kara Blackmore (curator)

Kara Blackmore explores the vital role art can play in developing and disseminating research to a variety of audiences.