Common Ground at Makerere and Bergen University

An artistic collaboration between two varsities explores the concept of common ground in our everyday life and how art can be used to find solutions to challenges in our immediate communities

ARTS | DOMINIC MUWANGUZI | The workshop Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Artistic Practice in Public Space, a collaboration between Makerere University, College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology, also known as Makerere Art School, and the University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Norway, is about common experiences between the two countries. The workshop explored the theme of indigenous knowledge, where both lecturers and lecturers picked elements or creative practices within their local communities to explore and respond to challenges in these respective communities. As such, the two communities identified majorly ceramics and sculpture art, which are rooted in each community’s cultural landscape, to interrogate common challenges between the two communities like, environmental conservation, climate change and identity, that are increasingly affecting these communities.

As a tool to underscore the commonality in both communities, albeit their geographical location, the workshop was designed with an exchange program for both the learners and their teachers. This program involved students from one institution travelling to another every after a specified period to have a first-hand experience of the cultural landscape of the country they were visiting and to create on-site sculptural works with their contemporaries. An example to this encounter was the participation of the students from Makerere Art School in the 2023 Ice Music Festival, a major cultural event in Norway. The students, alongside their teachers, immersed themselves in the production of a series of ice sculptures that were evocative of the identity of the festival, but also this activity seamlessly introduced the group to the Norwegian culture. In this, barriers of communication and learning were subverted, facilitating a common ground to learn and share new ideas.

Within this scope of learning, where emphasis is put on the idea of fast-hand experience or practical output rather than the final grades for the learner, the workshop inadvertently aligned itself with the concept of a competence-based curriculum that is being embraced by Uganda’s secondary and tertiary institutions today.

Suffice to say, the experience of learning more outside of the classroom rather than in the classroom itself was a refreshing experience and went further to ignite a spark in the students’ respective creative practices. “Just traveling to Bergen for a few months created a major shift in the way I think and approached my art. I was eager to return home to apply the knowledge I had received and to challenge myself outside the lecturer’s room,” says Joshua Semagganda one of the post- graduate students who participated in this program.  This sentiment is echoed by Prof. Phillip Kwesiga, who is the project coordinator and facilitator.  Kwesiga says that learning is not a single experience of reading and passing exams but is a series of experiences picked from different places a person has visited. “A person who has never left his village will always be different from that person who left their village and experienced life elsewhere,” he says.

The workshop, which took place at the Makerere Art Gallery with facilitators from both varsities and some of the participants, marks the end of this four-year program that started in 2022. Its success can be largely attributed to the commitment and passion to learn through exchange of ideas and experiences from both communities. But a profound attribute to the success of this program is the collective responsibility each varsity   has toward their immediate communities’ challenges. The appreciation that there’s a common ground shared by these two countries, one in the northern hemisphere and located near the artic circles where temperatures fall to frightening degrees and another country located in the southern hemisphere, near the equator with rains gradually breaking down, links them together to collaboratively work together to find solutions to these climate change challenges.

As such, Common Ground became more than an event where the academia exchanged ideas and visited each other’s spaces but also symbolized what is possible when two communities of people meet to solve their common challenges. Through such an encounter ideas are given birth but most importantly each of the participants returns to their local community eager to transform it into a better place by working with the available resources. Afterall, this is why artists exist, to solve problems of their immediate community.

****

The project was funded through the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills through NORPART. Images are courtesy of the Project.

Share on: WhatsApp