Home and Away

The life and challenges of displaced people in South Sudan

The project aims to present the life and Challenges of the South Sudanese people living in displacement all over South Sudan.

The aim of my project is to record the everyday life of those living in the protection of civilian sites, their challenges as well as their hopes.
The civil war and consequently the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan, goes largely unnoticed, despite the fact that this is probably one of the longest ongoing crises in Africa.
My work is anthropocentric. I am particularly interested in the notions of home. How do people who are living in ongoing displacement make homes. I want to understand what it’s like to be a displaced person in your own country. What it’s like to lose a home and be on the run, and having to search for a place where you can feel safe – a possible new home, which at the same time you know it will not be permanent, but your stay there won’t be brief either. How do you face the challenges of everyday life? How do you deal with a troubled past and an uncertain future?
My understanding is that they know their present situation pretty well, the status of their case and so on. These people need to create a new meaning in their life and to be able to engage in the present, to establish a new home. I am interested in the tensions that accrue as a result of ongoing conflict, volatility, and flux from interactions between people on the move and the institutions, systems, and structures designed to manage particular types of human movement, lead to states of high uncertainty and social fluidity. This tension has profound effects on practices of homemaking in pre-carious circumstances, notions of “return” to a recognized home, and indeed the meaning of the term home itself.
In some sense, the narrative of leaving home produces too many homes and hence no Home, too many places in which memories attach themselves through carving out of inhabitable space, and hence no place in which memory can allow the past to reach the present.