I wiiyi
In Memoriam 2024
These questions inform In Memoriam, a participatory installation created in response to the historical trauma surrounding the regime of Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. The work exists at the intersection of memory, participation, and absence and seeks to address a ud, mainly politically, symbolically, and emotionally.
Idi Amin’s dictatorship is widely acknowledged as one of the most violent in postcolonial African history. Yet, despite this recognition, the death toll remains uncertain. The International Commission of Jurists in Geneva estimated the number of victims to be no fewer than 80,000, and more likely around 300,000. Exile organizations, supported by Amnesty International, place the number closer to 500,000. On the other hand, scholars such as Jan J. Jorgensen have contested these higher estimates, proposing figures between 12,000 and 30,000. This range of numbers reflects not only the brutality of Amin’s rule but also the erasure and ambiguity that surrounds these deaths, lives lost in a void, with no definitive record or memorial.
The absence of a national memorial in Uganda is a striking and painful gap. In Memoriam emerges as a gesture to confront this void. The installation offers visitors a table stacked with paper, each sheet printed with the image of a cutout paper doll. This seemingly innocuous format, a reference to child references and the act of making, invites participation through its engagement. Visitors are drawn to the work without precondition, often unaware of its significance.
At its core, In Memoriam is a study in silent witnessing. It does not recreate violence; instead, it draws attention to the mechanisms of forgetting, the absence of public grieving, and the way historical violence can remain suspended in a kind of social amnesia. The work resists spectacle and instead leans into the aesthetics of minimal intervention, where absence, subtlety, and repetition become potent tools for reflection.
It asks: What is our responsibility when official systems of commemoration fail? What does it mean to rebuild memory not through monuments, but through gestures?
This approach aligns with philosopher Roberto Unger’s assertion that
“We often seem to be (such) helpless puppets of the institutional and imaginative worlds we inhabit.”
Yet this work resists that helplessness. It provides a quiet, deliberate invitation to step out of institutional forgetting and into the fragile work of collective memory-making. It is both an elegy and a protest, both archive and absence.