Letaru Dralega, a Ugandan Jamaican British artist and researcher, brought a deeply personal and philosophical approach to BADS_Lab 2024. Her work bridges the material and the metaphysical, using collage, painting, sound, and installation to explore memory, belonging, and the postcolonial condition. Grounded in African and Afrodiasporic ontologies, Dralega’s practice transforms the colonial wound into a site of tension, resistance, and speculative transformation.
For Dralega, the colonial wound is an intimate and collective rupture—a severing of language, kinship, and cultural connection. Reflecting on her grandparents, itinerant preachers in northern Uganda, she recalled their inability to speak English and her own inability to speak Lugbara their language. These gaps, filled with gestures and unspoken exchanges, became foundational to her inquiry. “The wound,” she explained, “is something that transcends language. Scars are bodily things that we all experience and can connect to without needing words.” Her textured, scar-like patterns evoke these embodied silences. They are not merely representations of injury but portals to a shared physical resonance, where visible and invisible marks of colonial violence converge. Dralega’s practice transforms these scars into tactile archives, resisting closure while inviting reflection on the fractures inherent in postcolonial identity.
Dralega’s artistic process moves from lament to appeal, an act of reclamation that disrupts linear narratives of healing. Initially, her marbled patterns offered contemplative landscapes, meditative in their stillness. Over time, her work embraced materials in tension: oil and water resisting one another, creating forms that resemble decayed skin or cellular rupture. These reactionary patterns evoke the unresolved dynamics of repair and rupture, rendering the wound an active site of creation. Central to her practice is the incorporation of 24-karat gold leaf, inspired by the art of kintsugi. Yet, rather than sealing fractures with permanence, Dralega uses gold to amplify their presence, turning brokenness into brilliance. “Gold,” she noted, “has always been used as an alchemical substance, knitting the material and the spiritual.” By gilding her works, she subverts its traditional connotations, transforming the substance of colonial exploitation into a medium for resilience and reconfiguration. Her scars shimmer not as tokens of triumph but as invitations to reimagine beauty. within histories of violence.
Dralega’s work challenges traditional notions of archival preservation, inviting viewers into a dynamic interplay of touch, memory, and sensation. Her textured surfaces function as embodied archives, evoking visceral responses—some reach out, others recoil. These interactions highlight the body’s capacity to hold and transmit history, where touch becomes a means of accessing collective pain and resilience. Collage becomes a critical tool in her practice, mirroring the fragmented realities of diasporic existence. By cutting, layering, and disrupting archival images, she dismantles the authority of colonial records, challenging viewers to engage with histories that are fractured but never silenced. The reassembled fragments create new, layered narratives that resist coherence, insisting on the complexity of diasporic identities. Her work does not simply archive; it activates, compelling us to confront what is hidden beneath the surface of the visible.
Dralega’s works meditate on the nature of belonging—not as a fixed state but as a dynamic process. She describes her practice as “pattern-seeking,” a way of creating forms that cross boundaries of language and culture. These patterns, emerging organically from her materials, echo the tensions of diasporic identity: a balance between control and unpredictability, rupture and reconciliation. Her gold-infused textures and layered collages invite viewers to engage with the body as a site of knowledge and connection. Dralega’s work suggests that belonging is not about erasing fractures but navigating them, finding resonance in the interplay of broken pieces. The spaces she creates are not solutions but propositions, offering ways to move through the scars of history with an openness to what might emerge.
Dralega’s works meditate on the nature of belonging—not as a fixed state but as a dynamic process. She describes her practice as “pattern-seeking,” a way of creating forms that cross boundaries of language and culture. These patterns, emerging organically from her materials, echo the tensions of diasporic identity: a balance between control and unpredictability, rupture and reconciliation. Her gold-infused textures and layered collages invite viewers to engage with the body as a site of knowledge and connection. Dralega’s work suggests that belonging is not about erasing fractures but navigating them, finding resonance in the interplay of broken pieces. The spaces she creates are not solutions but propositions, offering ways to move through the scars of history with an openness to what might emerge.
© Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines