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About the Installation
The installation of Perpetual Peace Project at Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) is an outgrowth of a series of collaborative activities exploring the relationship of peace to hospitality, reconciliation, and socio-political change with regard to current conditions in Rwanda. Participants to the project include approximately fifty of Rwanda's first architecture students.
It is situated within the arcbox, a shipping container repurposed as an exhibition space. The purpose of this reinvented space is to provide students as well as the community in Kigali with a place to foster creativity, innovation and architectural culture.
The installation emerges from a kit of materials including graphics, writing instruments, texts, and media. The students physically inscribe these materials onto the space, collectively transforming the shipping container through processes of translation.
This curatorial approach develops from an understanding that there are multiple definitions and practices of peace, and that the discourse of peace can itself be understood as an ongoing negotiation and process. The collective act of reading, writing, and translating Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace occurs within the city of Kigali, across the school, and in the exhibition space, which allows us to enact this idea across a variety of scales and spaces.
The exhibition space multi-functions as a space of hospitality, pedagogy, and display. Meals and social encounters, workshops and seminars, as well as graphic and media presentations establish the shipping container as a place for conversation about and participation with Kant's philosophical ideals.
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About the Public Programs
The installation provides a forum for ongoing workshops, seminars, and shared meals with students from the school.
Listen to documentation of discussions in the exhibition space and watch videos.
Acknowledgments
The Perpetual Peace Project at the Department of Architecture, Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), is organized by Slought Foundation, in partnership with Syracuse University Humanities Center and with support from Musagetes Foundation. Presented in partnership with the International Peace Institute (IPI), the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC), and United Nations University (UNU).
Our project at KIST, on display from July 22-August 9, 2011, developed as a collaboration with Aaron Levy and Mimi Cheng of Slought Foundation, architect/designer Ken Saylor, Yutaka Sho at KIST, and faculty and students in the Department of Architecture at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). Special thanks to exhibition coordinator Nerea Amoros Elorduy at KIST.
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