An international residency in Togo is bringing history into conversation with contemporary art, inviting a new generation to rethink how cultural heritage is preserved and experienced.

The ruins of an old radio station might appear to belong to another time. At Karp Kamina in Togo, however, the past is finding new expression through music, dance, research and artistic experimentation.

On October 5, 2026, the Karp Artists and Researchers Residency opened with traditional music and dance, welcoming participants from Togo, Ghana, Benin, Norway and beyond for two weeks of creative exchange.

Their mission reaches beyond documenting history: it is about finding new ways to make that history matter today.

When History Becomes Creative Material

At the centre of the residency is Radio Kamina, whose history has shaped the site’s significance. Between 2016 and 2022, the programme concentrated on exploring more than a century of the station’s past.

The current initiative expands that work, inviting artists, academics, dancers, musicians and culinary practitioners to interpret the site through different creative disciplines.

The 2026 edition, themed Cultural Revitalization II: Reclaim • Reimagine • Revive, treats heritage as something that can evolve rather than remain confined to archives and physical remains.

Visits to historical and tourist sites around Karp Kamina provide further inspiration, connecting participants’ work to the surrounding cultural landscape and community.

A Shared Responsibility for Heritage

The residency also raises a question relevant across West Africa: who should shape the future of historic places?

Preservation requires more than artistic vision. Local residents, traditional leaders, public institutions and investors all have roles to play in ensuring that heritage initiatives benefit the communities connected to them.

With support from local authorities and other sponsors, the project hopes to strengthen Kamina’s artistic life and attract wider cultural and research interest.

For Ghanaian audiences familiar with ongoing efforts to preserve historic forts, palaces and traditional arts, the initiative offers a related lesson: history becomes more meaningful when communities can engage with it creatively.

At Karp Kamina, the past is not simply being remembered. It is being given room to speak again.

The 2026 edition of the Karp Kamina Artists and Researchers Residency began on a high note as the Zogbéadji Band, officially known as the Association Culturelle et Artistique Zogbéadji d’Atakpamé (ACAZOT), delivered a magnetic opening performance that transformed the gathering into a vibrant celebration of traditional music, dance, and cultural memory.

From the moment the drums began to speak, the atmosphere shifted. Drawing on years of discipline and experience, the performers unleashed a powerful blend of energetic dance and frenzied percussion that immediately captivated residents and participants.

Their performance was not merely entertainment; it felt like an encounter with a living cultural tradition, expressed through rhythm, movement, costume, and ritual.

At the heart of the presentation was the spectacular Tchébé dance, one of the most visually stunning traditional dance forms in the repertoire.

Perched on towering wooden stilts that can reach as high as six meters, the dancers performed daring acrobatics with extraordinary confidence and balance.

Their movements were at once graceful and ferocious, creating moments of genuine suspense as they seemed to defy both gravity and physical limits.

The soundscape was equally commanding. Led by Tsèviska Le Baobab, the ensemble generated an intense, ground-shaking pulse that seemed to travel through the audience’s bodies.

Among the instruments was the sacred Aran-Lakou, or grand talking tom-tom, whose deep, resonant voice holds significance in the local Ifè language and tradition. In the hands of experienced percussionists, the drum became more than an instrument; it became a vehicle for communication, ceremony, and collective memory.

Visually, the performers reinforced the music’s power with vibrant traditional costumes and fierce body paint, creating a striking spectacle that complemented the relentless rhythm of the drums.

A gentler counterpoint came from young kora player Marie Jo Atikpolater, whose soft, flowing melodies brought a moment of calm amid the intensity. Her playing showcased the evening’s remarkable range, moving seamlessly from explosive percussion to the kora’s delicate resonance.

As an opening statement for the Karp Kamina residency, the Zogbeadji Band offered more than a performance. It presented tradition as dynamic, physical, and enduring—capable of thrilling contemporary audiences while carrying a people’s memory and identity into the future.

War photography often arrives from afar, bringing images of destruction, displacement, and death to audiences who may never encounter the conflict firsthand. Congo, Close to Home, however, offers a different kind of testimony.

Presented at Dikan Gallery in Accra, the exhibition brings together the work of seven young Congolese photographers whose cameras remain embedded in the communities they document.

Aubin Mukoni, Arlette Bashizi, Gloire Chasinga, Guerchom Ndebo, Jospin Mwisha, Marie-Jeanne Munyerenkana, and Moses Sawasgwa photograph life in and around Goma, a city of more than a million people on the shores of Lake Kivu.

Living under the shadow of conflict and occupation since January 2025, they document a society confronting violence while refusing to surrender its ordinary rhythms.

That tension gives the exhibition its emotional force. The photographs do not merely catalog war; they look at what unfolds alongside it. Markets continue.

People dance. Couples marry. Children play. Families mourn. Graves are dug. Daily life, in all its fragility and resilience, endures.

One particularly striking image shows a boy playing football on crutches at a camp for displaced people outside Goma.

It could easily be read solely through the language of tragedy, yet the football introduces another dimension: childhood endures even in circumstances that try to take it away.

This is where the exhibition moves beyond conventional conflict photography. Its photographers are not visiting journalists passing through a crisis.

They are witnesses who live with the consequences of what they photograph. Their proximity creates an intimate visual record in which the line between photographer and subject blurs.

Curated by Paul Ninson, chief curator of Dikan Gallery, the exhibition also advances a deliberate geographic argument. Displaying these photographs in Accra reminds us that Congo is not some distant African crisis beyond the concerns of other Africans.

From Accra to Goma, the exhibition proposes a shared continental proximity—geographical, historical, and human.

There is also an important question of authorship. In an age when images of African conflict are frequently produced for international audiences, Congo, Close to Home places the camera in the hands of Congolese photographers.

Their photographs therefore become personal documents as much as news images, preserving details that might otherwise disappear once international media attention shifts elsewhere.

Ultimately, Congo, Close to Home is an exhibition about a city that is broken but not emptied of life. Its photographs insist that beyond the headlines and statistics are people who continue to love, work, celebrate, grieve, and dream.

In that sense, the exhibition does more than document Congo’s war; it documents the stubborn persistence of life within it.