Where the broken heal and become new possibilities

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

The Great Repair exhibition unfurls across Nairobi like a living thing. The exhibition is anchored in the basement of The Mall in Westlands, spilling onto a mezzanine floor, and echoing through walks, talks, and satellite shows scattered across the city.

With more than 30 participating artists and over 400 guests at its opening, it is easily the biggest art event of the year.

Yet its magnitude lies not only in size but in its theme: Repair. Hosted by ARCH+, the exhibition asks audiences to consider repair as both process and product, a creative act that transforms brokenness into continuity.

Here, repair is not simply restoration but a philosophy—visible in the artefacts, embedded in preparation, and alive in the narratives that shape each work. From architectural preservation to ecological reimagining, the show insists that repair is as much about the unseen labour of creating as it is about the finished form.

Artefacts in the exhibition traverse continents, with Bas Princen’s photographs spotlighting repair at one of Africa’s most iconic architectural landmarks: the Mosque of Djenné in Mali.

His work underscores how climate change has disrupted socio-economic cycles along the Niger Delta, forcing communities to rely on less sustainable building materials. Yet in his images, grandeur gives way to the quiet resilience of maintenance—the annual mixing of mud and rice husks that has preserved the mosque’s stature for centuries.

Cave Bureau’s Maasai Cow Corridor Part II, also known as Ngombe Soft Life, is a sisal, medium-density fiberboard, and stainless-steel installation that recreates a small living room adorned with cow-related paraphernalia—from bells to sisal ropes—where a film plays across embedded screens.

Conceived as a reverse future documentary, it reimagines Nairobi through the eyes of its earliest inhabitants, the Maasai pastoralists, envisioning a city where cattle can once again move, graze, and coexist.

The work proposes Nairobi as an adaptive landscape—capable of responding to climate change and ecological exhaustion while confronting the historical injustices of Maasai displacement.

Built in the spirit of a Manyatta, the installation mirrors its ambiance and structure, designed to be assembled and dismantled with ease, echoing the nomadic rhythm of pastoral life.

Ugandan visual artist Sheila Nakitende’s work stands out not for its finished form but for how it embraces the process.

Her installation resembles a traditional utensil rack set upon earthen ground, yet it departs from the familiar Kenyan versions made of wooden sticks and mesh wire. Instead, Nakitende constructs hers from bark cloth, stretched scoby from kombucha—often referred to as vegan leather—and fiber, materials that have become central to her evolving practice.

Although she started as a painter, she has always experimented with different materials. Initially, she used waste paper.

“Through research, I realised that paper was made from fibers. Remember, although Uganda is a highly fibrous country, I hadn't seen any paper produced in Uganda. I'd seen recycled paper, but not produced from scratch. I started looking for unique fibers to work with,” she says.

She began with banana fiber and the bark of the Mutuba tree, but soon realised her knowledge of fibers was limited. To deepen her practice, she undertook a residency in Upstate New York in 2017, at a studio where artists harvested plants and produced paper directly from the farm.

Returning to Uganda, she had to adapt to the modest conditions of her own studio, improvising with simple tools. Bark was soaked, boiled, and beaten with a mallet, then pounded with a pestle and mortar into pulp, stretched by hand, and transformed into sheets of paper that became the foundation of her art.

With her new medium, she began experimenting with a range of techniques, from pulp painting to drawing directly on the paper with fire.

She even sculpted the material into face masks, marking the moment her practice shifted into an evolving process rather than a fixed form.

“Now I am more focused on understanding the cycle of my practice—where the material comes from, how it is nurtured, and the relationships behind it,” she explains. “I don’t make the bark myself; farmers harvest and prepare it, and I transform it. Even when I produce paper from bark, I sell it to other artists and photographers who continue to experiment with it.”

Currently, she runs her production like a small- scale factory. “I don't want it to become commercial and lose that authenticity. Every paper produced is unique, not replicated,” she adds.

Nakitende’s installation is intended to be as evocative as it is commemorative of our traditions. The shredding, boiling and beating of bark into paper is meant to simulate the process of repair itself.

“With repair, you have to respect time—the incubation, the slow building of process. In that preparation lies lessons in maintenance, resilience and the ability to manage when crisis comes,” she reflects.

“I have created my installation as a place of thought, a work in progress where ideas are shared in their evolving state, reminding us that meaningful work takes time.”

The beauty of Nakitende’s installation lies in her audacity to stretch imagination. Her rack is fashioned from bark skin and vegan leather made by stretching the scoby of kombucha—another of her inventive experiments that transforms humble materials into vessels of tradition and innovation.

“People have been experimenting with kombucha as a form of leather—vegan leather, as opposed to the animal hide we are accustomed to,” she explains.

“I am trying to merge these ideas to see how they can coexist. What you notice, however, is that every process of achieving these materials requires time. The technology is not in the result, but in the preparation itself.

“I am passionate about evolving our tradition and our indigenous technology because there are things we are forgetting that are relevant to our communities. For me, it is more rewarding that I get to contribute to that knowledge, move it forward so that someone can take it up and make it better. It is a journey.”

Reporting originally appeared via Business Daily. Read the full source for additional context.