The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim Project Statement
I never set out to make this work.
In 2018, I was in Rwanda working on landscapes for How We See The World when news broke about a mass grave that had just been discovered, almost 25 years after the genocide. I went to the excavation site to give my landscape work context (in much the same way that I had visited Auschwitz several years earlier). I did not intend to shoot there; it is not the type of art I make. However, I felt compelled to do what little I could to restore a semblance of dignity to the victims as their personal belongings were being pulled from the ground, still damp with earth.
The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim is a series of one hundred images that I photographed at Kabuga Village in 2018. All but the last image in the series are individual pictures of what victims wore on the last day of their lives, with a fictional statement in the first person. These texts reflect the experience I had while making the images — the overwhelmingly emotional feeling that I was shooting portraits of people, and not documenting objects. As a result, I feel compelled to refer to the images as “portraits” when I write or talk about them. The final image is simply a gray background, and the text reads, “We were” in recognition of the countless victims of genocide that will never be individually identified. An edit of 20 portraits from the series is included in this website, followed by two contact sheets showing the entire project.
I thought a lot about the scope of this project. Is one single shoe enough, or do you just keep documenting the evidence until our capacity to feel becomes numb? Ultimately, I settled on a series of one hundred images. It was a way of acknowledging the testimony of one survivor, who shared her experience of pretending to be dead – lying underneath a pile of bloodied, dismembered bodies – when she heard one of the perpetrators say: “I just need one more and I’ll have one hundred.” Those words continue to haunt me, challenging my grasp on “humanity.” The figure also pays tribute to the one hundred days over which the genocide took place. During this time, approximately one million people were murdered, making it the fastest and most efficient killing rampage of the twentieth century.
Without the “industrialized” killing of the Holocaust, in Rwanda most victims were killed by hand, one by one — many by someone they knew. Citizen turned on citizen. Neighbor on neighbor. People who had never killed before became murderers - family members, clergy, doctors, teachers, and so the list continues. Mostly they were incited by simple propaganda spread over the radio. So we have to ask ourselves, “What would it take for any one of us to hack someone we know to pieces with a machete?” The events of 1994 in Rwanda warn us that it may not take very much. It reminds us that humanity hangs in precarious balance.
My hope is that each of these posthumous portraits forces us to imagine, and therefore commemorate, the lives of those who were killed during the genocide. We can never comprehend one million dead people. We can, however, imagine the life story of the little boy carrying his doggy backpack, and each of the other people represented in this series. We can know them. Up until the day they were murdered, each lived at the center of their own life story.
While working at Kabuga Village, I reflected deeply on the words of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman: “In order to know we must imagine for ourselves. Let us not invoke the unimaginable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying that we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine it to the very end. We are obliged to that oppressive imaginable.”
Thank you for imagining with me.
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I am grateful to The Aegis Trust and the staff at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, for their help with research, logistics and identification of critical locations throughout Rwanda. This project would not have been possible without the support and cooperation of the CNLG (National Commission for The Fight Against Genocide) officials in Kabuga Village.