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In Memoriam 2024



How do you represent victims of a regime, war, conflict, and other atrocities that we have witnessed in this world? How do numbers, often repeated in news headlines and historical reports, communicate the scale of human loss? Can they ever truly reflect the complexity of lived lives, or the silence left behind?
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.


This is intentional. The piece reveals itself only after the act of participation has begun. What initially feels like a benign interaction gradually transforms into something weightier: the creation of a symbolic mass memorial. The repetition of the doll image, multiplied by participants, evokes the scale of the loss, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of unnamed victims. The audience, now implicated, becomes part of a shared act of remembrance.

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.


Variation of the installation during the Rietveld Graduation Show 2024


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