Artists Home, the project that Christian Nyampeta is currently developing in collaboration with philosophers working in Rwanda and further afield, will be a community house in Nyanza, Rwanda. It will be home to an artistic programme modelled on the “home”:

• a home for research, theory and practice engaged with the conceptualisation, theorisation and materialisation of contemporary artistic practices in Rwanda;
• a home structured as a social club or a platform for encounters, communication and preparation where art-related activities happen by gathering and sharing information about art and society, and where work for new concepts and methods for art learning and making in the context of Rwanda can be germinated.

The aim of Artists Home is to practice and to theorise an awareness of the potential of art’s social dimensions in Rwanda; and to awaken various possibilities for artists to intervene at practical social levels and to develop a sense of cultural responsibility.

Although there is limited public discourse on the visual arts in Rwanda today, this does not mean that symbolic creative work is not being undertaken, nor that such practices are not meeting societal needs. Through their participating in the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, the Nyanza Working Group wishes to map and to analyse the the “artistic” areas, the disciplines, the tactics and the strategies currently at play in Rwanda, and to explore the potential for extant practices to engage critically, regionally and transnationally with issues of our world.