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The Spark of Hope: Healing & Reconciliation in Modern Rwanda

Presented by Utah Cultural Celebration Center at Utah Cultural Celebration Center

April 27-May 30, 2009

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Photographer Chris Nobel’s exhibition of his experiences with the people and places in Rugerero, a genocide survivor’s village in western Rwanda.

 

The images in this exhibit were created in 2007 when local photographer Chris Nobel accompanied artist and social activist Lily Yeh and her Barefoot Artists group to Rugerero, a genocide survivor’s village in western Rwanda. Starting her work two decades before in the ghettoes of Philadelphia, Lily uses public art as a catalyst for social change in impoverished and traumatized areas worldwide. Lily Yeh will present the Keynote Address and the Mountain West Conference on the Arts, hosted at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center on May 7. By helping people take pride in their own environment and learn to work together, Lily and her associates ignite the spark of hope in those whose experience has previously been only hopelessness and despair.

Rugerero is a village like a million others in the Third World. It has the same grinding poverty, the same lack of resources, the same burning hunger for food and security. And yet for all that, when you meet the people there, what strikes you is not what is lacking, but what is abundant. What stands out is the indomitable spirit of the people, the fire of humanity that burns so brightly. “I am someone,” their eyes tell us. “Notice me.” “Respect me.” “Give me a chance to show you what I can do.”

It is Chris Nobel’s hope that these portraits of the people of Rugerero can help audiences realize that despite the horrific trauma of the 1994 Genocide, the citizens of modern Rwanda are truly rising from the ashes to create one of the most vibrant, optimistic, and promising nations in Africa.