Opening HMO building: photo exhibition/book launch 'TRACES'

The ASCL welcomes you to the photo exhibition and book launch of TRACES at the African Studies Centre Leiden on the occasion of the official opening of the Herta Mohr building of Leiden University, 8 October 2024, from 5PM.

TRACES presents a photo-ethnographic project that investigates how violent conflict reverberates across borders and generations. It explores the ways in which people connect to conflict in the past and present despite (temporal and geographical) ‘distance’. When ten years after the civil war, a new political crisis announced itself in Burundi in 2015, anthropologist Lidewyde Berckmoes felt forced to leave her ‘second home’. The peaceful future she had hoped to contribute to, seemed shattered. For a long time, it remained unsafe to return to broken Burundi, and so she wanted to learn from other people who live with its traces.

Through photo-ethnography in the Netherlands and Belgium, Marieke Maagdenberg (photography) and Lidewyde Berckmoes (ethnography) explored how young people of Burundian heritage relate to the conflict past and present in Burundi. In the work, they open up questions of transnational belonging, diaspora activism and legacies and reiterations of conflict trauma. In the exhibition, visitors can see part of the art photography of the project by Maagdenberg, as well as hear more about the findings detailed in their photo-ethnography TRACES.