Musealised:
Editor's Note
An editorial reflection on musealisation as a living, unfinished process of documenting, questioning, and collectively shaping cultural memory through art, architecture, and participation.
By Rebecca Khamala
St. Francis Chapel interior murals Photo: Franklin Kasumba
Rebecca Khamala
Rebecca Khamala is a multidisciplinary designer, artist, and writer with a background in architecture whose work explores traditional craft, spatial design, and the idea and notion of space. Drawing from a deeply ingrained heritage in weaving, she collaborates with local artisans to revive and reimagine traditional crafts for contemporary life. Her practice explores themes of grief, healing, ecology, and public space, using local materials to create both aesthetic and functional works that honor culture and community, while her research delves into the relationships between material culture, food cultures, and ecosystems.
I first encountered the St. Francis Chapel murals some two years ago through a photograph taken by Franklin Kasumba. What immediately intrigued me was the careful composition and placement of these unsightly forms – colourful yet indecipherable – arranged in neat, well-aligned panels set at the back of a curved chapel ceiling, with the rest of the surface extending forward in a cool sky-blue wash. Where is this? Who made this? How can I see this?
About a year later, by sheer serendipity, I crossed paths with art historian Prof. George Kyeyune, whose research includes these remarkable works. Around the same time, the idea of a documentation workshop series focusing on architecture and art was beginning to take shape. A few months later, when the programme commenced, the murals of Makerere University quite naturally became the case study.
What makes murals fascinating is the threshold they occupy somewhere between art and architecture; framing spaces, elevating lived experience, and telling stories while becoming intricately linked to the environments they exist within. The murals at Makerere University are particularly compelling for the stories they hold, the places they inhabit, the materials they embody, and the legacies they continue to carry.
This inaugural publication, emerging from Kraftor’s Art & Architecture Journal Workshop Series embraces process, experimentation, uncertainty, and beginning. The publication itself is entandikwa – a start. It marks the beginning of an effort to strengthen local capacity for cultural production through practice, observation, reflection, and collective participation.
From March to May 2026, participants were prompted to pay closer attention to the built environment, absences, textures, histories, silences, and their own curiosities. The workshops and walking tours invited contributors to move beyond passive observation into active interpretation through looking closely, writing curiously, and reporting attentively while remaining grounded in context.
The encounters themselves – standing before these works, immersed in their grandeur, captivated by their beauty and basking in their overwhelming presence – made us realise how difficult it was to put the experience into words. Yet the struggle extended beyond language to capturing it visually. One thing became unmistakably clear, though, as we walked these halls, looked along the walls, and up toward the ceilings: the spaces felt different. The presence of these artworks transformed the atmosphere entirely. The stories they unfolded, the histories they carried, and the artistry embedded within them gave the spaces an almost museum-like quality.
In trying to articulate that sensation, the word musealise surfaced
The word musealised sits at the heart of this publication as a reference to preservation and more than that, as a provocation. At its core, musealise refers to the act of placing or treating something within the frame of the museum, where it may be archived, classified, conserved, and protected. Yet in doing so, there lies the danger of distancing, of rendering something static, untouchable, or disconnected from the living conditions that produced it. In the context of this publication, musealised extends beyond its definition and reshapes how we think about museums and heritage. It draws attention to these murals as cultural heritage embedded within everyday spaces, ordinary environments where their influence is both pervasive and largely unacknowledged.
Embedded within the fabric of Makerere University, they sit quietly alongside the older buildings that shape the campus, gradually slipping into familiarity, almost to the point of invisibility. What was once a deliberate act of artistic intervention risks being absorbed into the background of daily life, its significance softened by repetition and routine.
And yet, even in this muted state, the murals continue to act on their surroundings. They imbue the atmosphere with a lingering sense of history, shape perception, and carry a quality that exceeds their apparent mundanity, often unnoticed by those who move through these spaces.
This tension prompts a series of questions: What happens to cultural memory when it is only encountered as heritage? Who decides what is worthy of documentation, preservation, or interpretation? And how can cultural production remain alive, unfinished, contested, and in motion?
What emerged from the programme is a body of work intentionally plural in both form and voice: essays, journal entries, reflections, visual experiments, photographs, and unresolved questions. Underlying the publication is a shared concern with how art, architecture, and memory circulate through Kampala and beyond, what remains visible, what disappears, and what survives only through fragile acts of retelling. Each contributor approaches these concerns differently.
Sarafina reflects on multispecies existence and the internal negotiations of representation through journal entries. Lorna listens to the emotional and spiritual residue embedded within campus architecture, considering how buildings continue to shape those who move through them. Merritt turns toward Ignatius Sserulyo’s A History of Books, uncovering not only a history of books, but a history of communication itself, reminding us that communication did not begin with books, and that books themselves existed long before paper, inscribed instead onto stone, tablets, and other surfaces.
Asmaa, encountering forms of African art distinct from the predominantly Arabic visual culture of her Sudanese background, interrogates the politics of documentation itself: who is remembered, who is searchable, and who risks erasure. Atrisia, on the other hand, shifts the question of erasure to the architectural reality, interrogating the material vulnerability of murals within evolving institutional spaces to highlighting how bureaucratic maintenance, restoration, and preservation practices decide the lifespan of public art. Leandra draws visual parallels between mural techniques, facades, and the layered aesthetic experiences of Kampala, tracing both inheritance and rupture within artistic legacies. Jacob extends the encounter with the St. Francis murals beyond physical space through projection, mapping, and digital realities, while Jim Joel situates Cecil’s wider body of work across Kampala in dialogue with the Vertebrates Invertebrates mural at the zoology department. Franklin, through photography, returns us to the collective experience of the mural tour itself; preserving not only the artworks, but the act of looking together.
The programme also opened wider questions around curiosity, knowledge, and ways of seeing. What happens when we study not for immediate return, but out of genuine curiosity? How might art help bridge the gaps within our understanding of the more-than-human world? How can anthropological and artistic perspectives cultivate empathy and compassion toward lives, systems, and existences beyond ourselves? These questions quietly move beneath many of the contributions gathered here.
If Franklin had not photographed those murals, they may never have entered my own field of attention. That realisation further affirmed the purpose of this programme: to create a community of practice, and to foster the creative documentation of our world, beginning where we are and with what we have.
To musealise, then, is not merely to preserve objects behind glass. Here, it becomes an act of critical engagement, revisiting histories without immobilising them, documenting culture while allowing it to remain porous, lived, and evolving. Heritage, as such, is understood as continuously produced through attention, participation, and exchange, rather than as a fixed archive.
Working on this publication has reaffirmed Kraftor’s commitment to holding space for that process: documenting and sharing cultural heritage, disappearing histories, and having critical engagements with contemporary art, architecture, and design in ways that honour both patience and experimentation. What you encounter in these pages is neither perfection nor a definitive archive. It is a beginning. It is a collective refusal to wait for expertise, permission, or institutional certainty before creating, documenting, and contributing to the cultural record.
Many Thanks!
With the completion of this inaugural edition of the Art & Architecture Journalism Workshop Series, we extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who made this programme possible through their generosity, patience, knowledge, and enthusiasm.
To our workshop facilitators: Christine Matua, Franklin Kasumba, and Carol Kagezi, thank you for sharing your time, insights, and practices so openly with the participants. Your guidance challenged us to look closer, think deeper, and engage more attentively with the stories held within art, architecture, and public space.
To Professor George Kyeyune, thank you for guiding us through the Makerere murals with such care and generosity. We deeply appreciate the time you spared to walk with us, engage our questions fully, and enrich our understanding of the historical, artistic, and social contexts surrounding these works.
To Joseph Tumusiime, custodian of St. Francis Chapel, thank you for welcoming us into the space so warmly and for generously sharing not only the chapel murals, but also the many artworks and histories whose existence many of us were only discovering for the first time. Thank you for entertaining our curiosity and enthusiasm with such openness.
To the Kraftor team, thank you for holding space for this programme and for continuously encouraging, challenging, and supporting the participants throughout the process. Your commitment to nurturing local cultural production and documentation made this experience possible.
And to Goethe-Zentrum Kampala, thank you for hosting and supporting the programme and for contributing to the creation of spaces where critical cultural engagement, experimentation, and learning can take place.
Finally, to all the participants: thank you for showing up with curiosity, vulnerability, attentiveness, and willingness to begin. This publication exists because of your openness to experiment, question, document, and share.
St. Francis Chapel interior murals Photo: Franklin Kasumba