Sparked by Artists, Shaped by Community.
About (ART)ONEMENT
A participatory installation and community festival exploring art as a space for making amends, reconciliation and collective renewal.
The concept
The name joins ART and ATONEMENT, to propose that art can be more than something to look at. It can be a process through which people make amends, celebrate abundance, rebuild relationships and imagine a shared future.
(ART)ONEMENT is an experimental arts project exploring creative expression as a tool for reconciliation, healing and renewal. The name reflects our core goal: using ART to foster ONEMENT, meaning unity, trust and shared purpose.
We reimagine the creator's role. Moving beyond isolated gallery pieces, artists act as facilitators who invite the public to become co-creators, turning public space into a living studio.
Origins and roots
The project draws on communal traditions found across Kenya and Uganda, where harvest festivals have historically brought communities together in the village square to share food, dance, resolve disagreements and celebrate collective survival.
In these gatherings, the harvest is not only a measure of agricultural abundance. It is also a moment of social reckoning. People return, meet, exchange, raise grievances, seek mediation from elders, forgive one another and reaffirm their place within the community. Music, dance and craft become the means through which a community faces hardship, celebrates life and restores balance.
(ART)ONEMENT brings this model to modern Mombasa through collective art-making.
The communal sculpture
At the centre of (ART)ONEMENT is a large-scale communal sculpture, built collectively by artists and participants from discarded and reclaimed materials: wooden pallets, scrap timber, cardboard, paper and papier-mâché. Masks and other sculptural elements emerge from the same materials, turning what has been thrown away into a shared cultural expression.
Throughout the festival, participants contribute materials, stories, memories, hopes and gestures to the growing sculpture. It becomes a collective archive, a physical record of many voices rather than the vision of a single artist. The sculpture holds what people bring to it, including the things they choose to leave behind.
Why reclaimed material
The choice of material is also a reflection on the condition of the creative community. Artists and other makers frequently work from scarcity. Their labour can be misunderstood, undervalued or treated as peripheral, despite their ability to document histories, question power, preserve memory and give communities new ways of seeing themselves.
(ART)ONEMENT places the creative act at the centre of community life, showing that artists are not merely entertainers or producers of objects, but essential participants in the cultural, emotional and social health of a community.
Masks, music and the communal meal
The communal meal, storytelling, music and dance all draw on the traditions of gathering around the harvest. Mask-making is a long-standing art form across the East African coast and beyond, and here it is used to give visible shape to the things a community faces together.
The festival ends with a closing ceremony: a moment to look at what the community has made, and to carry it forward.
(ART)ONEMENT asks what happens when a community does not simply consume art, but makes it together.It proposes the village square as gallery, the artist as community facilitator, discarded material as cultural resource, and collective making as an act of reconciliation.
Co-producers
The project is co-produced by Africa Nomads Art Space and Living Design Studios. Africa Nomads Art Space serves as the physical home and anchor for all festival activities and installations.
Our charter
- DecommodificationOperating within a gift economy. Art is a communal act, free from commercial interests.
- Radical acceptanceA safe space for free, authentic self-expression without fear of prejudice.
- Radical opennessNo gatekeepers, permissions or experience needed to participate.
- Environmental stewardshipPrioritising reclaimed, low-waste materials to practise sustainability.
- Shared governanceDecisions are community-owned and built from the ground up.
The sculpture is temporary
The relationships created through it are the true monument. (ART)ONEMENT is an invitation to make, to listen, to celebrate, and to rediscover why art and artists matter to a community.