The Home Stay Exhibitions: The Home and the Image as Hyperlocal Sites of Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

In the Home Stay Exhibitions young Rwandans are mentored to produce photo stories which they exhibit in their homes, opening the doors to neighbours and friends. Using photography to make new conversations possible, the initiative contributes to social healing in post-genocide Rwanda. This article provides an empirical case study of the Home Stay Exhibitions as a form of localised peace photography. It contributes to arts and peacebuilding and visual peace research by demonstrating how photography is harnessed by local actors to break down entrenched distances and to carve space for inclusive dialogue around hidden areas of peacebuilding including gender, justice and community.

KEYWORDS:

• Rwanda
• peace photography
• arts based peacebuilding
• dialogue
• visual peace

Introduction

Building peace is understood to be a creative act and process (Lehner 2021; Lederach 2005). Arts-based practices, and specifically participatory arts where conflict-affected community members are supported to be creative producers, have become an increasingly popular component of peacebuilding and transitional justice, with researchers and artists integrating and applying participatory arts-based methods to support community healing, reconciliation, dialogue and to foster peace (Zelizer 2003; Rush and Simić 2014; Cohen 2020; Cooke and Soria-Donlan 2020). A recent agenda for visual peace research has specifically called for a focus on how, in a world increasingly mediated by images, the visual arts and photography might contribute to peace (Möller 2019; Mitchell et al. 2020). Photography has been used as a conflict transformation tool to open up dialogue and build shared stories in communities living with the legacies of inter-ethnic conflict (Bau 2015). It has been harnessed to enable conflict-affected communities to build agency, find common ground, identify key issues and as a resource for reconciliation and community change (Acan et al. 2019; Denov, Doucet, and Kamara 2012; Reimers 2016; Smith 2020; Lykes, Blanche, and Hamber 2003). However, despite increasing use and attention, there is still a pressing need to extend the patchy evidence and research base on the dynamics and effects of peace photography and arts-based peacebuilding more broadly (Hunter and Page 2014; Simić 2021; Baily 2019). Often artist-led, under-resourced, under the radar and small-scale, participatory visual and arts projects are not adequately documented, researched and evaluated (Fairey 2017). This has acted as an obstacle to better understanding the dynamics, relevance and impact of these activities in conflict, post-conflict and peacebuilding settings.

This article provides a qualitative case study of the Home Stay Exhibitions, a participatory photography and mentoring project in Rwanda. Following the focus of this Special Issue on local agency and the interactions between different local peace actors (Kostovicova and Vico 2024), it offers a detailed analysis of the exchanges and conversations catalysed by one of the Home Stay Exhibitions. It demonstrates how in the context of post-genocide Rwanda, participatory peace photography works to open up dialogue on sensitive topics and hidden aspects of peacebuilding such as gender, justice and community and to foster localised social healing. The analysis highlights the enabling contextual conditions – the intentional methodological approach, the specific qualities of photography and photographic images and cultural associations with the photographic medium – that shape the dynamics and effects of this particular participatory peace photography intervention and the encounters that happened around it. In conjunction with other articles in this volume it considers how the arts prove a trusted space for local actors to dialogue around delicate issues outside of principal peacebuilding narratives (Kochanski 2024) and examines the contribution that local artists play in re-imaging peace and reconciliation (Kerr 2024). The article draws on collaborative action research using mixed methods undertaken between 2020 and 2022 by the author with Jacques Nkinzingabo (a Rwandan photographer, director of the Kigali Centre for Photography and the instigator of the Home Stay Exhibitions), and the young Rwandan photographer participants.

The Home Stay Exhibitions saw young Rwandans produce photo stories on subjects of their own choosing which they exhibited in their homes, inviting neighbours, friends and community members to discuss the depicted issues, which ranged from potato farming and fishing to underage mothers and the role of men in family life. In the Rwandan context where the years since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi' have seen a gradual erosion of inter-ethnic trust (Ingelaere and Verpoorten 2020) and many families have closed the doors of their homes to neighbours and friends, the Home Stay Exhibitions seek to reopen the doors and rebuild trust and relations using photography to start conversations on relevant community concerns.

Our findings demonstrate that the Home Stay Exhibitions fostered cross-community peace by creating image-mediated interactions that catalysed social healing by rebuilding dialogue between different groups in the community. Social healing refers to the reconstruction of communal relations after mass violence and can emerge through initiatives that rehumanise broken relations, rebuild trust, normalise daily life and restore hope (Green 2009). Social healing serves as intermediary located between micro-individual healing and wider collective reconciliation (Lederach and Appleby 2010). The ‘spacious’ term, Green (2009, 77) argues, is more appropriate in scope for what is realistic after war and extreme violence when the familiar concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness, which are more demanding for many victims, need to play out over decades and generations and can be counter-productive if pushed on societies. Social healing requires communities to acknowledge violence and oppression (Green 2009, 78) but also, as is fostered in the Home Stay Exhibitions, to engage and be transformed by a process of restoring relations and dialogue to better live and make decisions together and rebuild a shared commons.

Transforming their homes into temporary exhibition spaces Nkinzingabo and the young photographers use their photography and creative agency to drive social healing by breaking entrenched everyday public/private barriers and scripted patterns of community engagement. Redesignating the home as a safe space in which to cultivate relations of proximity and inclusive dialogue, the Home Stay Exhibitions work to reduce isolation and foster understanding. Repositioning more marginal members of the community (such as young people and underage mothers) as central agents, the intervention harnesses the open-ended dialogical capacity of the image (Fairey and Orton 2019) to carefully break boundaries and silences and to generate revised and new perspectives on community issues. At the micro-level, they respectfully challenge community power dynamics, the hierarchical nature of national discourse in post-genocide Rwanda and expand local and international peacebuilding narratives by centring oft-sidelined topics such as gender and livelihoods.

In Rwanda, where healing is understood to occur through social reconnection in everyday life (Pells et al. 2021), creating spaces and places where community members can gather and have unscripted conversations is key to fostering thicker forms of reconciliation (Little and Maddison 2017). The Home Stay Exhibitions involve micro-interactions between young photographers and their mentor, those they photograph, their families and different members of the community. The impacts of these image-mediated interactions, as evidenced in feedback from those involved, include the generation of inclusive dialogue around sensitive and taboo subjects, shifts in attitudes and a fostering of social healing. These impacts are localised but they are significant for the actors involved. They provide key insights into the transformative potential of creative, participatory visual interventions and the role that local artists have to play in cultivating cultures of peace within communities. The Home Stay Exhibitions demonstrate how intentional arts and visual peacebuilding processes can disrupt existing modes of community engagement. By designating local actors with narrative and discursive agency, visual peacebuilding initiatives reframe the conditions and possibilities for community dialogue and interactions.

The article is structured over five sections. Firstly, I provide an overview of the key research thinking and questions around arts-based peacebuilding, participatory peace photography and the dialogical capacity of images for peace that set the frame for the empirical research and analysis of the Home Stay Exhibitions. Then in the methods section I outline the development of the Home Stay Exhibitions model and the collaborative research, data collection and analysis methods employed to generate the findings. In the third section I consider the post-genocide context in Rwanda before providing an analysis in two parts: on the home and on the image as sites to transform existing spatial and dialogical practices and to facilitate hyperlocal peacebuilding. Drawing on the multiple perspectives and experiences of the Home Stay Exhibitions participants (the photographers, their photographer mentor, their families, the people in their pictures and invited audience community members), I show how the Home Stay Exhibitions operate as a form of localised peace photography to foster social healing and inclusive dialogue.

Arts-based peacebuilding and participatory peace photography

Despite being marginalised from mainstream peacebuilding (Kappler and Richmond 2011), in recent decades arts and culture have gained increasing prominence as a tool to support peacebuilding, reconciliation and transitional justice processes (Cohen 2020; Simić 2021; Baily 2019). As an antidote to the dominance of professionalisation and managerialism in professional peacebuilding, Lederach (2005, 161) has suggested that peacebuilders see themselves as artists. He argues that creativity is crucial because there are limits to what linear, mechanical processes and solutions can achieve in complex, non-linear peacebuilding settings where conflict dynamics are driven by long-standing hostilities or mistrust shaped by real-life experiences, subjective perceptions and emotions which are dynamic and unstable.

Research highlights the capacity of arts-based peacebuilding to facilitate positive forms of hybrid peace (Redwood, Fairey, and Hasić 2022), to heal and repair the damage done by conflict and violence and to build cohesion, voice and agency (Baily 2019). Arts and culture have been highlighted by the UN for their capacity to engage conflict-affected communities, and especially youth, in peacebuilding and to provide a space for these communities to articulate their experiences, raise their voices and try out new identities (Greiff 2015; Simpson 2018). Specifically, participatory arts, where local communities and youth drive the artistic and creative production, and arts-based peacebuilding that is locally owned, centred around grassroots actors and adapted to local cultures are noted as making more effective contributions to peace (Baily 2019; Mkwananzi and Melis Cin 2022; Pruitt 2013). These arts activities do not necessarily need to explicitly aim to improve security, peace and reconciliation – in some contexts such framing can serve to alienate communities and undermine the peace potentialities of the arts – but rather the peace benefits emerge as natural by-products or subsidiary outcomes of the activities (Fairey 2018).

While arts are increasingly seen as a ‘go-to’ peacebuilding tool, the value of arts-based peacebuilding is yet to be fully realised (Hunter and Page 2014). The evidence base is patchy and incomplete. There has been a tendency to over-romanticise the impacts of the arts and a reliance on anecdotal evidence (Cooke and Soria-Donlan 2020). Projects are often small scale, short-term, volunteer driven, under-documented and resource poor. This poses serious challenges to systematic research and evaluation over time. Traditional evaluation and research methods focus on pre-defined objectives, casual links, quantitative measures, direct outcomes and linear models of change. Such approaches fail to capture the emergent, participatory qualities and impacts of the arts which deal in creative processes, subjective experiences and emergent outcomes that defy standard forms of measurement (Fairey and Kerr 2020; Fairey et al. 2020).

Another issue is that the arts are often discussed in generic or universalistic terms. There has been limited research that builds a more nuanced picture of the contextual, cultural and medium-specific conditions that shape their dynamics and effects. In addition, there has been little consideration of how the characteristics of distinct artistic forms and mediums might be more suited to achieving different kinds of peace outcomes or priorities depending on the cultural, conflict and peace contexts people are working in. This is key because the kind of art people produce, how they want to use it and for what ends depends on their cultural context and their proximity, in time and space, to war (Thompson, Hughes, and Balfour 2009). In addition, different people respond to and engage with different art forms in different ways depending on their own preferences, capacities and cultural associations with different creative mediums.

This article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating the specific contribution of the photographic medium and of visual images to inclusive community dialogue in the context of contemporary Rwanda. How is photography being used to amplify local agency and support social healing in this particular rural context in Rwanda? What are the cultural associations and understandings of the photographic medium that shape those possibilities? Running in parallel to a growing interest in arts and peacebuilding there has been a call for researchers to pay more attention to the neglected relationship between photography and peace (Möller 2019). Photographic images have always played a role in ‘world-making’ (Mitchell 2005, 93) but they have taken on increasing political significance in recent decades as the speed at which digital images get produced, disseminated and shared has accelerated at an exponential rate. Now more than ever, digital photographic images are everywhere acting as forces that cut across the dimensions of our public and private lives to shape politics, conflict and our attitudes and emotions (Bleiker 2018). Whilst extensive research considers the role of images in war, a new visual peace research agenda examines how images are illustrative of peace and how photography can contribute to or even anticipate peace by making plural conceptions of peace visible and by supporting and amplifying peacebuilding, dialogue and conflict transformation processes (Möller 2019; Bellmer, Fairey, and Möller 2024; Ritchin 2013; Allan 2011).

Establishing a direct causal relationship between peace and photography is difficult because images do not operate on actors in isolation, and they act differently on different actors at different times (Möller 2020, 29). However, images work to ‘sketch new configurations of what can be said and what can be thought’ (Rancière 2009, 103) as they set the parameters for what we see and where we direct our attention. Conflict-affected communities can use the camera to define and make visible what matters to peace from their localised perspectives and in so doing they can subvert dominant peace and conflict narratives and foster peace imaginaries in their communities and beyond (Fairey, Cubillos, and Muñoz 2023). In such a way photography and images can nurture peace and the potential of peace because they frame the conditions of possibility within which peace can take place (Bleiker 2018).

Existing studies that work with participatory visual methods in post-conflict settings emphasise the dialogical potency of images and image-making and frame their peacebuilding effects in terms of the conversations that they facilitate and the relations that extend out from the image. Images are revealed as dynamic spaces where meanings are sought and negotiated (Fairey and Orton 2019), enabling difficult discussions about wartime experiences (Denov, Doucet, and Kamara 2012), dialogue that engenders healing and builds identity (Fairey, Cubillos, and Muñoz 2023), that enhances self-understanding and self-esteem (Lykes, Blanche, and Hamber 2003), that builds agency (Smith 2020) and shared world views (Bau 2015) in communities rebuilding post-conflict and dealing with ongoing violence and division. The dialogical potential of an image is rooted in its interpretive ambiguity (Bellmer and Möller 2022) and the fact that we all see different things when we look at an image and we all respond in different ways. Conversations about images, their meaning and significance, allow participants to engage with, gain insight into and even navigate difference and plural perspectives while also finding points of commonality and interest. Images have the capacity to both confirm and disturb what we think we know, allowing them to transform, dislocate and validate our ways of seeing. Conversations mediated through images enable contributors to critically reflect on their own positions, gain insight into the positions of others and develop conversations that can contain multiple perspectives (Liebenberg 2018). In this way images enable us to hold and sit with unresolved difference while also identifying common ground.

Collaborative arts-based research

The Home Stay Exhibitions were first conceived by Jacques Nkinzingabo, director of the Kigali Centre for Photography (KCP), in 2018 when he was running photography workshops with rural youth in Nyabihu, a mountainous district in the western province of Rwanda heavily dependent on subsistence agriculture. Partnering with Rwandopp, a Rwandan NGO working to transform the lives of rural communities through youth engagement, and in conjunction with the local district and schools, KCP photographers recruited and trained 35 young people in photography and visual storytelling over six weeks. The young people worked on self-selected photography projects which they showed in Home Stay Exhibitions where they presented their photography in their own homes (Figure 1) as well as in the local community centre and KCP’s own photography gallery in Kigali.

Figure 1. A Home Stay Exhibition, Nyabihu, 2018. © Kigali Centre for Photography.

Nkinzingabo continued to mentor a number of the youth who were most enthusiastic about photography. In 2019 funding was secured to undertake a second round of Home Stay Exhibitions with four young photographers and to conduct the collaborative action research on which this paper is based.¹ Over two-and-a-half-years (2019–22) the young people selected subjects they wanted to photograph and produced their own photo projects with three out of the four photographers presenting these in Home Stay Exhibitions in April 2022.² The projects and mentoring process were affected by multiple delays and disruptions due to the COVID pandemic and other issues which included flooding in Nyabihu. The young photographers’ ages ranged from 18 to 23 years over this period. At the beginning all of them were in their final year of high school and some went on to further education and university while others were working or looking for work. All the participants were given cameras donated to KCP and also had access to digital SLRs (on loan from KCP) to shoot their final photo projects.

Their photo stories covered self-selected subjects ranging from underage mothers and masculinity to potato farming and fishing culture, with each young photographer consciously linking their chosen subject to themes relating to questions of community and family peace and conflict or what theorists might understand as expansive conceptions of positive or justpeace (Lederach and Appleby 2010). From this standpoint, issues of economic livelihoods, gender dynamics and social justice are understood to be essential to durable positive forms of peace. The young photographers want to transform what they see as ongoing obstacles to long-term peace and reconciliation at the micro-level of family and community and to start conversations that honour their community, shift attitudes and inspire change. The photo stories, and the photographers’ motivations and aspirations for their photography, warrant a detailed analysis which will be done in future writing. For this article, the focus is on the conversations and interactions that the images catalysed rather than the contents of the images themselves.

The arts, photography and images can be harnessed to shut down dialogue and fuel division as much as they can be used to facilitate dialogue and connection (Bleiker 2018; Baily 2019). It is Nkinzingabo’s intentional approach to photo mentoring as a means to build up young Rwandans which designates it as a form of photography that proactively contributes to peace. His approach to individual and group mentoring work involved not only in person photography workshops and outshoots but individual and small-group communications and ongoing contact with the photographers via telephone and in person as they developed their visual projects and planned and produced their exhibitions.

The active and informed consent of all the contributors was sought. The photographic mentoring involved tutoring in the ethics of visual storytelling,³ where the young photographers were guided by Nkinzingabo to work carefully to build relationships with their photographic subjects as active contributors (Nkinzingabo 2022b). Security and ethical concerns were fully reviewed and discussed. There were various conversations over time between Nkinzingabo, the photographers, those that appeared in their photographs and, with the families of their photographic subjects to ensure they fully understood the project and what their participation involved. The photographers explored different visual storytelling strategies and there were extended conversations on how best to frame and represent the stories, with special consideration given to the projects that dealt with more sensitive issues, such as the underage mothers project which is the focus of the analysis in this article. Likewise there was an extended dialogue with the families of the photographers, some of whom hosted Home Stay Exhibitions to enable them to make informed decisions about their participation.

The action research on which this article is based was conducted by the author in collaboration with Jacques Nkinzingabo and the young photographers over a two-and-a-half-year period that directly coincided with the global COVID pandemic. The author visited Rwanda in November 2019 but pandemic travel restrictions prevented further international travel and so it was necessary to work remotely with research collaborators for the remainder of the research period. Nkinzingabo and KCP colleague Jean Bizimana visited Nyabihu district five times during the research, navigating around various periods of national travel restrictions as well as conducting the mentoring via phone and through meetings in Kigali when the young people travelled for work and studies.

Data was gathered through iterative semi-structured interviews with the young photographers, their families and those that featured in their photographs at different points in the project. The author and Nkinzingabo engaged in eight active semi-structured interviews (Holstein and Gubrium 1995), some that utilised photo elicitation methods⁴ (Harper 2002), and these provided a means to collaboratively examine the conceptualisation and methodological implementation of the Home Stay Exhibitions. Iterative qualitative analysis of translated and transcribed interview data was undertaken over the research period and presented in a research-in-process blog.⁵

Various forms of qualitative data were collected when the exhibitions took place in April 2022. This data included Nkinzingabo’s participant observation (Musante and DeWalt 2011) during his own participation in the Home Stay Exhibitions and his field notes, visual documentation (photos and videos) of the exhibitiosn and semi-structured interviews with Nkinzingabo and the young photographers. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with exhibition audiences and the exhibition hosts (both individual and group interviews) before and after the exhibitions to gather information on different contributors’ experiences and opinions on the exhibition. Pandemic conditions and restricted resources imposed limits on the ability of researchers to collect more extensive interview data. Logistical issues resulted in variance in the data collection across all of the three exhibitions and the analysis in this article focuses on the one family member exhibition during which the most data was gathered. Iterative qualitative analysis of all the data combined grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1994) and interpretive thematic analysis (Tickner 2005) to identify key findings.

Rwandan context

Since the 100-day genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, Rwanda has been working to rebuild, reconstruct, rehabilitate and promote lasting peace and stability. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has driven an ambitious recovery programme which hinges on the transformation of Rwanda from a low- to middle-income country through economic redevelopment and its repositioning as a knowledge-based economy and regional hub for technology and services. Named in 2009 by the World Bank as ‘the world’s leading reformer’,⁶ Rwanda has seen economic and infrastructure reforms, considerable state-building and security measures, the provision of universal access to education and significant and successful efforts to increase female leadership.

While Rwanda’s socio-economic transformation is remarkable, understanding and evaluating the legacy of its transitional justice mechanisms and post-genocide recovery has been an ongoing contentious issue (Straus and Waldorf 2011). Initiatives such as the gacaca courts and the government’s nation-building campaigns have been both praised and criticised. The ambitious Rwandan state-building project exhibits growing authoritarian tendencies,⁷ with restrictions on political parties, civil society and the media justified as necessary measures to prevent the reoccurrence of ethnic violence (Samset 2011; Straus and Waldorf 2011). A core element of the government’s peace agenda has been to construct one Rwandan nation through an ideology of national unity, reconciliation and forgiveness which involves a revised singular version of Rwandan history and a tightly controlled discourse around the memory of the genocide which does not accommodate the experiences of all victims. The official government discourse of national unity requires that citizens identify only as Rwandans and has largely banned the issue of ethnicity by erasing it from identity cards and official documents and discouraging the discussion of ethnicity within the public domain. This nationally curated peace and reconciliation absorbs and mutes existing tensions in Rwandan society, creating silences around divergent histories and unresolved, ongoing frictions. While the top-down scripting of a national unity ideology benefits the state, it has come at the expense of plural, localised and adaptive efforts to support community healing and resilience (Burnet 2021). It is often micro-level activities that are the most successful in promoting thick forms of reconciliation (that foster the restoration of dignity and the positions of victims while tackling marginalisation and discrimination) rather than thin reconciliation which consists of coexistence with little or no trust, respect or shared values (Burnet 2021; Seils 2017; Keyes 2019).

Breed (2006) raises questions around how community arts have been implicated in Rwanda’s wider political staging of nationhood and post-genocide reconciliation (Breed 2006, 512). Her research explores how grassroots associations, many linked to the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, harnessed the arts, particularly theatre, as a tool to reconstruct communities and foster reconciliation in the post-genocide years. While these initiatives created community healing and reconciliation, some raised a dilemma around how the arts were being instrumentalised to establish state-driven messages that demanded consensus and did not cater for open debate and dialogue.

In a context where victims and survivors continue to live closely alongside pardoned perpetrators and bystanders the politics and experiences of reconciliation in Rwandan communities are complex and divergent (Cieplak 2017). Rwanda’s elite have little understanding of the lived experiences of Rwandan citizens (Thomson 2018), especially those in rural communities where there is a historically high level of compliance (Ingelaere 2010). According to indicators used by the Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer (2020),⁸ Nyabihu district, where the research in this paper is located, is among the first ten districts where individual healing is still at a low level. Wider social healing is also an issue. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ‘shredded the social fabric’ (Burnet 2021, 102) of Rwanda. Despite the passing of time, survivors, perpetrators and their families continue to present with considerable rates of mental health and psychosocial problems, with the data revealing a strong association between health problems and psychosocial factors such as social integration (Rieder and Elbert 2013). Communities continue to be marked by feelings of mistrust, social isolation and uncertainty (Richter et al. 2010) and there is evidence of a gradual erosion of inter-ethnic trust in the post-genocide years (Ingelaere and Verpoorten 2020). Ad hoc local grassroots initiatives and everyday coping practices that respond directly to ordinary people’s needs without promoting other political agendas have served to gradually rebuild social ties (Burnet 2021). However, the extent to which community-level interactions consist of thin reconciliation rather than thick reconciliation is a matter of ongoing debate.

The legacy of the genocide against the Tutsi and its ongoing effects on individuals and communities is not only felt by those who directly experienced it but has trans-generational effects on young people (Breed et al. 2022). The young Home Stay photographers are part of the ‘second generation’, those born after the genocide, that are central to the government’s vision for a reborn Rwanda (Benda 2018). However, for many young Rwandans, their day-to-day realities, which include considerable financial constraints as well as other obstacles that prevent them from pursuing further education or participating in the new knowledge-based economy, are incongruent with the purposeful new future vision of the country (Pells, Pontalit, and Williams 2014). Young Rwandans, tasked with the building of a new Rwanda while dealing with the legacies of the genocide and cultural norms, have to navigate considerable stresses and hurdles (Pells, Pontalit, and Williams 2014).

Transforming the home

Nkinzingabo conceptualised the Home Stay Exhibitions with the deliberate intention to break down the barriers that have grown around people’s private homes since the genocide. Ordinarily a community photography project would culminate in an exhibition in a public community space. However, the Home Stay Exhibitions are intentionally located in the private vicinities, both inside and outside, of the photographers’ family homes. Differentiating between place (a material, physical phenomena) and space (an immaterial imaginary phenomena that designates meaning and values), scholars highlight the potential of ‘placemaking’ as a peacebuilding strategy (McEvoy-Levy 2012). Peacebuilding agency can be found in actors’ capacities to transform specific places (such as home) into spaces where meaning can be remade and peaceful values and cultures fostered (Björdahl and Kappler 2017). Places come with their own specific protocols and power relations that structure actions and behaviours within and around them. With his purposeful locating of exhibitions within people’s homes Nkinzingabo seeks to disrupt existing spatial practices and ‘in so doing to develop new connections and new places of belonging and identification’ (Björkdahl and Bukley-Zistel 2022, 7) that create fresh possibilities for peace and social healing.

The home is central to the ways in which people narrate and calculate their own (in)security (Mac Ginty 2019) and the notion of home in Rwanda is directly tied to family and community relations (Ndushabandi, Uwihoreye, and Nzahabwanayo 2021). Before the genocide against the Tutsi people used to gather in and around their houses in the evenings to chat and pass the time of day (Nkinzingabo 2022a). The concept of home, or ‘murugo’ in Kinyarwanda (the national language of Rwanda), as a safe place of protection for yourself and those you love, was broken by the genocide when homes were ransacked, and occupants killed. Since then people have closed their homes to outsiders and even to friends and family members where there are lingering or ongoing conflicts. Nkinzingabo explains when he was growing up he never invited friends to his home,

It is no longer in our culture to bring people into your home because of our history … it is too complicated, you do not know the history that your family has with their family, you cannot be sure how your family will react to you bringing someone to the house, there is a fear that others might poison you. There are these tensions and growing up you absorb them. (Nkinzingabo 2022b)

The invisible barriers around the home can be understood as an engrained everyday peace coping practice (Mac Ginty 2014). These are behaviours by which traumatised people learning once again to coexist and live together post-genocide have delineated closed private spaces to re-establish and maintain a sense of personal safety and in response to lingering conflict or tensions that go back to what happened between neighbours and within families during the genocide. However, this erecting of fixed boundaries undermines the reparation of community relations by exacerbating social isolation and disconnect as people keep their distance from each other and avoid personal interactions and exchanges. Deeply divided societies that have suffered inconceivable violence can get stuck in a ‘holding pattern’ where, despite peace, tensions continue. Divisions can be reinforced by the strategies, unspoken pacts or informal rules that govern people’s day-to-day contact (Mac Ginty 2014, 550). This holding pattern can become entrenched in how people occupy and use spaces which are marked as settings where past conflicts continue to play out, shaping existing social relations (Björkdahl and Bukley-Zistel 2022).

The Home Stay Exhibitions disrupt these boundaries by temporarily transforming the home once again into a safe and welcoming place where people can gather and converse and where peace and trust can be built (Nkinzingabo 2022a, 2022b). Artistic interventions can transform engrained spatial practices by showing an alternative and refusing to operate within the existing spatial restrictions (Cole and Kappler 2022). Evidence shows that in Rwanda changes in trust reside in evolving experiences of trustworthiness in social interactions (Ingelaere and Verpoorten 2020). By dissolving spatial distance and inviting people into their homes, the Home Stay Exhibition hosts reach out to shift the entrenched practices and invisible walls that act as obstacles to the rebuilding of trust. The home is a ready space which the young photographers, with the support of their families, can directly access, take charge of and transform. As one family member highlights, a Home Stay Exhibition ‘does not require us to have a fortune’ (Baramusaritse 2020).⁹ The hosts can extend a direct invitation to neighbours and friends and set the terms of engagement to ensure people feel comfortable and welcome.

Photography as a key to open the home and conversations

The idea of hosting a home exhibition was initially a strange concept for the photographers, their families and the village audiences who are unaccustomed to having people come to their houses. There is shame over the poverty of their homes and concerns that they do not have enough chairs for guests or refreshments to offer (Nkinzingabo 2022a). During the first round of the Home Stay Exhibitions in 2018 Nkinzingabo had to build trust and understanding with the photographers and their families to explain the thinking behind hosting a home exhibition. Audiences also need persuading. This is where the images first become significant. ‘Photography is the first key to bring people into each other’s homes …  it draws people who were far apart into one space’, Nkinzingabo (2022a) explains. People are curious about what the young people, who have been seen photographing around the village, have been doing and so, putting their wariness to one side, they come.

The potential for what is possible with photography is shaped by cultural context. Photography and images generate an interest in Rwanda and crucially they inspire trust at both the public and private level. Nkinzingabo points to two cultural associations with the photographic medium. The first association he explains by way of a popular saying that has entered common parlance with the growth of social media. ‘Ntafoto Ntacyabaye’ means, ‘If there is no photo, nothing happened’. This is a reworking of an older saying that translates as ‘Rwandans trust when we see’. The maxim speaks to the idea that Rwandans will only believe or trust something is true when they see visual evidence or proof (Nkinzingabo 2020b). The world over, photography has been harnessed as an instrument of documentation, record and truth, endowing it with an ‘evidential force’ (Barthes 1982, 85). In Rwanda the capacity of photography to legitimise its subject holds significant weight in communities.

At the same time as inspiring public trust, at the personal and private level photography generates trust by evoking intimacy. Guarding family memories and history, the family photo album or family photos were often the first thing offered to visitors when they came to a Rwandan home and are much treasured (Nkinzingabo 2020b). Photography as a conduit for personal truths and histories endows the sharing of images and the act of looking at images together with an intimacy that stirs a comradery and trust as visitors share family stories as confidantes. This dual capacity of photography to inspire distinct kinds of trust, to legitimise and evidence while invoking intimacy and familiarity, equips images with a specific currency and potency to engage communities in the Rwandan context.

The images serve to bring people in and they are also key to making new kinds of conversation possible. The Home Stay Exhibitions harness images to create a different quality and form of dialogue and community interaction that supports social healing (Green 2009). They do this by breaking with the fixed protocols that ordinarily govern community gatherings in Rwanda. This is where community members listen to a designated compere, often a community leader or institutional representative, and do not actively participate or contribute to the proceedings unless in some predetermined or pre-scripted capacity. Such community events, held in public community centres and meeting places, which are structured around a controlled, hierarchical format, do not enable or facilitate inclusive or collaborative dialogue; rather they serve to close down horizontal conversations between different groups in the community and they generate silences. The concern here is that, in a context where political prescriptions and protocols curb the conversations that are possible, nationally led or scripted peace and reconciliation has come at the cost of locally driven and more collaborative modes of dialogue and peacebuilding which support community healing, tend to local-level needs and concerns and promote grassroots reconciliation (Burnet 2021).

A discussion of the dynamics and interactions of Richard Aime Ingabire’s Home Stay Exhibition illustrates the kinds of dialogical dynamics and their impacts. Ingabire ‘s exhibition was held at the home where he lives with his aunt. He presented his photo project on underage mothers alongside two of the young women featured in his photographs. Over 2 days approximately 40 people came to his aunt’s house in two separate gatherings that lasted approximately 1.5–2 hours each. Audience members included a group of younger men who were community youth leaders, older women who were friends of his aunt, the families of the young mothers, a representative from the regional Youth Chamber and other neighbours and friends.

Prints from Ingabire’s project were laid out on every seat and when people first arrived they spent time looking at them, handling and discussing them with the people next to them. Before the audience were introduced to the exhibition, they were asked to reflect on what they thought the photographs were about. This seemingly simple invitation represents a radical departure from the existing community meeting format. By inviting the audience to start the conversation, the prescribed structures that designate who can speak and on what grounds are upended and the platform is set for a different and more horizontal mode of unscripted and inclusive interaction. At Ingabire’s exhibitions the audience had various queries which came back to a key question: why have you taken pictures of these women? In response, Nkinzingbo, Ingabire and two of the young women featured in his photographs proceeded to present the project, ‘Pregnancy but not by choice’, that documented the experience of underage mothers in the community, many of whom are pregnant due to rape by force or manipulation (Figures 2 and 3). Ingabire explained (Figure 4) how with his project he wants to raise awareness of how these women are treated and ‘to create a conversation around the rejection and bullying of young mothers’ (Ingabire 2022). This he says is crucial to ensuring a positive future for them and their children and peace within families and the community (Ingabire 2022). The young women explained about their experiences and why they allowed Ingabire to photograph them before opening the conversation back to the wider group again. Different members of the community then raised various points and questions.

Figure 2. Portraits of Jaxia Abizerimana (left) and Julienne Dushimimana (right) from ‘Pregnancy Not By Choice’. Photography by Richard Aime Ingabire.

Figure 3. Portrait of Angelique Dusabimana from ‘Pregnancy Not By Choice’. Photography by Richard Ingabire. When I became pregnant … I stopped school and … so now in order to find food I have started a small trade. I am trying to learn to be a tailor. But really my future is not good, and my family have lost hope in me. I had a dream to finish my school and to be a person of importance in society but I failed. Now I am looking after my child and thinking about how we can survive in our daily life. Even if I met with challenges I will not stop.

Figure 4. Richard Aime Ingabire talks at his Home Stay Exhibition 2022, with Jacques Nkinzingabo in the background © Kigali Centre of Photography.

Young pregnancy is a national concern¹⁰ and an issue that all of the community are troubled by. The conversation touched on sensitive questions such as what kinds of relationships are possible when women have been raped or manipulated into having sex, the relationship between the families of the young mothers and others in the community, the future of the children born to young mothers and of the mothers themselves and sexual health and education. The conversation was respectful, with everyone making an effort to ensure the young mothers were not made to feel judged or shamed. There was an acknowledgement that they already carried too much burden of blame (Nkinzingabo 2022b). One older man asked why it was the case that many young mothers went on to have more children by different men. His question was met with silence. He apologised for it but said it was a question that needed to be raised. The older women questioned where the men were in Ingabire’s photographs and they, along with the youth leaders, urged Ingabire to continue his project by talking to young men. The youth leaders invited Ingabire and the young women to present the project at a district youth summit. One asked one of the young mothers why she had not been to youth conferences and she challenged him, saying that as a mother she was not welcome as she was no longer considered to be a ‘youth’. The youth leader was embarrassed and committed to speaking up for young mothers in the youth forums.

The conversation was open-ended, and raised plural views and questions to which there were no clear conclusions or solutions offered. The images carved a space for asking questions rather than offering answers. Nkinzingabo notes that the ‘conversation went on and on’ and that this is his common experience: ‘In these exhibitions for every single image there is a hundred questions that people have’ and the conversation continues long after the photo presentations have ended (Nkinzingabo 2020a). Writing about photos, Harper (2002, 23) notes the quality of the ‘deep and interesting talk’ that images elicit. The dialogical potential of photographs comes from the collaboration that is inspired when people question and discuss the multiple meanings and significance of an image (Harper 2002, 23). Photographs allow a community to critically reflect back on itself, to define and contextualise the issue at hand as they discuss the relevance and substance of an image and what it shows. Images’ ambiguity and their surplus of meaning make them apt vehicles to communicate diverse narratives introducing new levels of complexity into conversations in which participants can acknowledge different positions while finding points of commonality helping them to understand and identify with each other, if not entirely then partially (Bellmer and Möller 2022). In the Home Stay Exhibitions the images mediate people’s different positions enabling a conversation that was layered, that acknowledged multiple perspectives and experiences and that generated insight and meaning for those involved. This form of image-mediated collaborative dialogue may not achieve consensus and immediate resolution but it can generate more complex conversations that inspire insight and comprehension which spills over and extends beyond the conversation that is specific to the images themselves to feed social healing.

The effects of image-mediated conversations

The responses to Ingabire’s Home Stay Exhibition highlighted three effects or dynamics of image-mediated conversations. Firstly, images facilitated conversations about sensitive subjects. The capacity of images to negotiate conversations around sensitive and culturally taboo issues that are hard to tackle directly has been noted by researchers (Rose 2007; Denov, Doucet, and Kamara 2012; Smith 2020) and in photo therapy and therapeutic photography settings (Gibson 2018). In the context of Ingabire’s exhibition, the discussion navigated themes such as rape, sexual manipulation and sex education as well as questions of stigma and shame. The images acted as buffers, conduits and metaphors for difficult conversations that could be touched on and carefully conversed around while also providing a segue to a different track when the conversation became too challenging, with the image acting as a diversion to open up multiple other conversational tracks to explore.

Secondly, the image-generated conversations resulted in shifts in perspectives and understanding. Evident in people’s feedback, after Ingabire’s Home Stay Exhibition, was a change in perspective, position and possibility that emerged from the dialogue as the exhibition brought them together to discuss a single issue of concern to the community. A number of people said the conversation had changed their understandings of young mothers. The youth leaders were keen to work further on the issue. Older members of the community were pleased to have discussed the matter with the younger generation. Ingabire believes this was to do with the fact that everyone was able to contribute and recognise their responsibilities towards the young mothers because no one party felt judged. ‘It is more like every person there, all corners of the community were being judged, the babies’ fathers, the girls’ parents, the young leaders, the community itself’ (Ingabire 2022). In this instance the photograph becomes a site for wider reflection and analysis where it communicates not only the photographer’s perspective but acts a medium and stimulus for ‘an ever-widening discussion’ of the different realities and positions present within the community (Lykes, Blanche, and Hamber 2003, 84).

Thirdly, the particular character and quality of the image-mediated conversations served to build social healing by reconnecting different sectors within the community and rebuild trust and understanding even when the conversation was not explicitly undertaken with peacebuilding or resilience in mind (Burnet 2021). What is evident in participants’ feedback to Ingabire’s Home Stay Exhibition is how, beyond any attitudinal shifts, the dialogue and coming together contributed to a rebuilding of the social fabric. One neighbour said they had come to support Ingabire but that they met many people they did not expect, ‘it is uniting getting to know more people’ (Ntawirinda 2022). Ingabire noted that people came together because they were curious about the photographs but that it did not end there, ‘it’s basically a chance to meet, mingle, fix issues between them or even to have open discussions about different things’ (Ingabire 2022). Various people interviewed spoke about how the Home Stay Exhibition made the community feel like a family again (Ingabire 2022; Dushimimana 2022; Baramusaritse 2022).

For the young mothers in Ingabire ‘s images, the exhibition made them feel less isolated and ostracised. One of young mothers, said the ‘pictures contributed by bringing us together to discuss things instead of how things are commonly done here where people sit with their own perceptions without discussing them’ (Dushimimana 2022). For another the Home Stay Exhibition made her realise ‘we are not alone, that there are people who understand’ and that as a young mother she can contribute by educating others (Dusabimana 2022). Participants noted the lack of spaces, so key to community healing, where people can converse and have these kinds of conversations.

Images have a discursive agency and frame the conditions for conversation. In the Home Stay Exhibitions Nkinzingabo and the young photographers specifically harness photography to foster dialogue that is horizontal and inclusive but it should be noted that photography could equally be employed to shut down and close conversation. Community arts initiatives are always vulnerable to co-optation (Matarasso 2019). The suggestion is not that the Home Stay Exhibitions sit as a neutral space outside of its own form of power dynamics that shape and inform what dialogue is possible. This is especially the case in a context where participatory arts, alongside being used to construct new identities and relationships, are simultaneously implicated within the ‘wider political staging of nationhood’ (Breed 2006, 508). However, Nkinzingabo argues that many of the national-level radio shows and theatre initiatives dedicated to peace education and embedding reconciliation have now stopped and there is a need for a shift in emphasis to how these conversations can be facilitated at the level of community (Nkinzingabo 2022b). The Home Stay Exhibitions offer one such model where sitting and looking at photographs together in the intimacy of someone’s home inspires a trust and camaraderie between community members that breaks down barriers and provides a catalyst for horizontal conversations.

Conclusion

Given the challenges associated with assessing the impact of arts-based peacebuilding, treading a line that is mindful of the constraints and limitations of small-scale creative initiatives such as the Home Stay Exhibitions whilst recognising the potential of photography as a tool for catalysing and strengthening community dialogue is key (Fairey and Kerr 2020). The peace potentialities of images and image-making are possibly greater than before given the extent to which the political and communicative space is now constructed and driven by the visual (Bleiker 2018; Möller 2019) and these potentialities can be harnessed by communities as well as professional image-makers.

If peace can only reach its potential when it is given life through everyday enactments and embodiments, hyperlocal acts that use the arts, and specifically images and image-making, as a means to build trust and dialogue are a vital part of a wider localised dynamics and circuitry without which peace and reconciliation on a larger, national scale has nothing to latch on to (Mac Ginty 2021). These localised peace photography initiatives warrant attention for how they designate agency to those taking charge of the camera and contributing to the images and for their capacity to disrupt pervasive barriers and silences and forge pro-social relationships and dialogues that have the potential to grow into something more substantial.

Providing evidence of the local interactions catalysed by the Home Stay Exhibitions, this article contributes to arts and peacebuilding and visual peace research by demonstrating how artist-initiated community interventions make new kinds of localised horizontal conversations possible on sensitive, hidden or under-prioritised topics, between generations and between different members of the community. Repositioning the young photographers and those that contributed to their projects, as peace agents, the initiative demonstrates how the home and photographs can be harnessed as sites for building community agency, connection and dialogue. If dialogue is linked to positive peace and reconciliation (Nolte-Laird 2022) then, as one of the young photographers described it, using their photographs to bring the community together to listen to each other and to speak is ‘the first point to peace-building’ (Mugisha 2022).

Theorists have posed the question, how are places and spaces tainted by conflict transformed to represent and manifest peace (Björdahl and Kappler 2017)? The Home Stay Exhibitions represent a possible response. For the Rwandan pioneers of this form of micro-visual peacebuilding, Jacques Nkinzingabo and the young photographers, they are clear: ‘We have a lot of work to do as visual storytellers, I would love to see more photographers joining us to do more Home Stay Exhibitions because I can’t reach all homes in Rwanda by myself’ (Mugisha 2022). Evident is how they identify new possibilities to use photography to amplify grassroots peace and dialogue. This is peacebuilding on a small scale but it is nonetheless significant as it creates new kinds of conversations and interactions that facilitate grassroots dialogue and social healing that work to navigate localised tensions and embed durable peace.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jacques Nkinzingabo and the young photographers, Richard Aime Ingabire, Aline Nayituriki, Gisele Uwase and Delphin Mugisha, and their families for their collaboration and input which made this research possible. I am most grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose insights and feedback honed and strengthened this article. The research was undertaken as part of Imaging Peace, a multi-country study of participatory peace photography funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. It was also made possible thanks to funding from the Visual Embodied Methodologies Network in the Faculty of Social Sciences & Public Policy at King’s College London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust: [grant number ECF-2020-175]; VEM Network, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy, King's College London.

Notes

1 Funding was first provided by the Visual & Embodied Methods (VEM) Network at King’s College London and subsequently from a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

2 One of photographers was unable to host her Home Stay Exhibition due to family issues.

3 The ethics of visual storytelling refers to an approach to photography that puts ethics at its centre and carefully considers questions of power, the photographer’s responsibilities to those they photograph and their stories, their dignity and matters of informed consent. Recent initiatives within different visual fields have sought to raise practitioners’ ethical visual literacy; see for example ‘The Dignified Storytelling Handbook’. 2021. https://dignifiedstorytelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Dignified-Storytelling-Handbook-English-Dec-2021.pdf.

4 One of these photo elicitation interviews, The Images That Define Us, with Jacques Nkinzingabo is available to see online: Accessed February 6, 2024. https://www.artscabinet.org/imagingsocialjustice/the-home-stay-exhibitions-part-three.

5 Further information on Imaging Social Justice as well as a three-part blog research in progress series on the Home Stay Exhibitions can be found on the Arts Cabinet. https://www.artscabinet.org/imagingsocialjustice.

6 See ‘Doing Business 2010: Reforming through Difficult Times’. 2009. World Bank. https://archive.doingbusiness.org/en/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2010.

7 Repeatedly rated as ‘Not Free’ by Freedom House (a US-based watchdog organisation that monitors democracy, political rights and civil liberties around the world), political dissent is suppressed though surveillance, intimidation and suspected assassinations. See here for their country assessment on Rwanda: https://freedomhouse.org/country/rwanda

8 The Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer is government-mandated research study that is undertaken every five years by the National Commission for Unity and Reconciliation to assess the steps taken towards unity and reconciliation in Rwanda. https://www.rwandainun.gov.rw/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=24853&token=72a119c58554f99bc72a1ec83a4efb01c832757f.

9 Schwandner-Sievers & Klinkner’s research (2019) in Kosovo on the home museum built by Ferdonije Qerkezi in memory of her missing family members provides another example of how those directly affected by conflict have harnessed their homes as accessible places where they are able to direct their own forms of memorialisation and community outreach.

10 Ingabire’s project chimes with recent calls for more action and research against teenage pregnancy. https://rwanda.unfpa.org/en/news/seeing-unseen-end-teenage-pregnancy-rwanda.