Image by Lucie Touya. In August , during a meeting where I was invited to be part of the team to share ideas on how to re-establish and run the Start Art journal, artist Margaret Nagawa, who is also the pioneering person in the effort to revamp Start Art Journal, suggested to me to develop a short narrative essay talking about my role as Curatorial Assistant in the Kampala Art Biennale.
In response to this suggestion I have compiled a short visual essay with some of the pictures that I made on the job, as well as those that were made my others, including my friend, Gosette Lubondo, a young photographer from DRC who lived with me for the time she was in Uganda.
Besides simply mentioning events as they happened: this is what people usually write in diaries, I also bring to light personal opinions towards some of the happenings. I try to use some general language for some of the information, which I feel is sensitive. In March , I met the biennale curator, Elise Atangana with whom we discussed a lot about the artists, venues and what we both had to do between then and the opening of the biennale.
We visited some of the artists and service providers. Some of the venues that had confirmed availability of their space for the biennale, had exhibitions running after 20 th August, and some were in really bad physical condition by this time. This made me question how emails, which are what we mostly used in communicating to the service providers, are perceived in our local context, and how this affects the reality of what they imply. To what extent can we label emails independent in appropriating communication in our local contexts?
It was only in cases where we did some back and forth movements to accompany our emails, that we registered success. This therefore meant that for April, May, June, and July, when both of us were not in Uganda, the dialogue with our service providers came to a long pause, which was only reawakened when we returned to Uganda in August.
