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Lubiri Mengo

2024Aluminum, Terracotta Clay, Resin

Installation during the Rietveld Academie 2024 Graduation show

Lubiri Mengo is a study presented at the Rietveld Academie GRA 2024, rooted in the psychic ruins of postcolonial trauma, state violence, and survival. Installed within the symbolic geography of Lubiri Mengo, the former palace of the King of Buganda, whose cellars were used as dungeons for prisoners during the Idi Amin regime, the work confronts a dark and largely undocumented chapter of Uganda’s past: the torture practices carried out under Idi Amin’s rule.

Stories of what occurred inside the infamous torture chambers circulate as fragmented whispers: impossible to fully verify, yet too consistent and too brutal to ignore. According to one such account, prisoners were placed in a circle and handed hammers, ordered to eliminate one another until a sole survivor remained. That person, deemed “the victor,” would be “rewarded” with a final, merciful bullet.

Whether or not the specific details can be confirmed, the emotional weight of these stories carries an undeniable truth. Lubiri Mengo does not aim to verify the past but to evoke it—to imagine a space where inherited violence collides with the emotional machinery of the present. A space where the boundary between myth and memory, fact and folklore, becomes ethically charged.

The installation reimagines this scene with a subtle yet haunting shift: a circle of four robotic arms, each crafted from terracotta clay and aluminum, holds hammers suspended in stillness. Controlled by a joystick, these mechanical limbs stand in for the human body and its entanglement with agency, submission, and violence. The materiality itself tells a dual story: clay as earthbound, fragile, and intimate; aluminum as cold, sharp, and industrial.

The joystick, unlabelled and inviting, becomes a device of ambiguity. It is unclear what it will trigger or what is expected of the user. There is no instruction, only invitation, and in that uncertain space lies the confrontation. What does it mean to hold the power to act or not act? To become complicit, or to remain a spectator?

By embedding violence within a mediated, robotic form, Lubiri Mengo removes the spectacle of blood and replaces it with psychological unease. It asks: What does mechanized violence look like when stripped of its human skin? The cold precision of robotics mimics the dehumanization central to authoritarian systems of control. Participants are implicated but distanced; the ethical dilemma is staged but never fully resolved.

As part of the development of Lubiri Mengo, I conducted a study to examine whether the installation evoked the ethical and emotional tensions I intended. Participants were invited to interact with the joystick without instruction, allowing me to observe the emergence of hesitation, engagement, or refusal. This process became an extension of the work itself, testing how ambiguity, agency, and complicity activated emotional responses in real time.

The installation also reflects on the echo of violence through time, carried in bodies, gestures, and silences. It recalls not only the regime of Idi Amin but also the preceding legacies of colonial brutality, the rule of Milton Obote, and the systemic violence seeded long before independence. Rather than retelling history, Lubiri Mengo stages a rehearsal of memory, asking viewers to stand at the fragile edge of a narrative that is both speculative and terrifyingly plausible. Its placement within the grounds of Lubiri Mengo anchors it in historical specificity, while its materials and mediated methods propel it into a speculative, contemporary imaginary.

Lubiri Mengo is ultimately a work about complicity, about the mechanics of power, and about what happens when the capacity to inflict harm is disguised as a choice, or worse, as play.