COLOURS OF COMMUNITY

By Standing Voice

August 17^th, 2018

This year, Standing Voice was honoured to host the groundbreaking visual artist Camille Walala at our home on Ukerewe Island, in northern Tanzania. With the celebrated art director Julia Jomaa, Camille travelled to Tanzania to meet our beneficiaries and help renovate our beautiful Umoja Training Centre (UTC): a community facility providing skills development and economic enrichment to people with albinism and their families across Ukerewe Island.

Renowned as the queen of colour, Camille's influences include the Memphis Movement, the Ndebele tribe and the optical art master Victor Vasarely; her clients include Nintendo, Koppaberg, and many more. Her eye-catching manipulations of block primary colour have graced objects and spaces across the globe, from jumpsuits to houseboats and cushions to casinos. Some of her best work has wound its way into the vistas of the world’s most famous cities, with her multi-storey murals adorning the concrete landscapes of Brooklyn and Shoreditch.

This year, it was our turn to receive the Walala treatment. A client of creative communications agency Zetteler (whose founder, Sabine, is a Standing Voice trustee), Camille encountered our charity earlier this year and felt “deeply moved”. She and creative producer Julia Jomaa travelled all the way to Tanzania to conduct a beautiful transformation of the UTC.

In one whirlwind week, Camille and Julia painted the centre’s spaces with their trademark splash of colour. Their work began with our water tanks, which harvest over 180,000 litres of rainwater and are visited daily by the Ukerewe community. Boldly decorated, these tanks grew to reflect the beauty of the surrounding scenery and the people of Ukerewe: now not only a source of life, but of inspiration too.

Moving inside, Camille and Julia helped to renovate our centre’s training facilities. Collaborating with designer-fabricator Simon Sawyer, print artist Alex Booker and local carpenter Lusato Mkeka, they painted the walls of our brand new community library with a beautiful geometrical design. Together they painted black and white circles, whose symmetry distilled the philosophy of the Umoja Training Centre: to promote equality and unity between all of its users, regardless of the colour of their skin.

In the radio suite—the newly refurbished home of Ukerewe’s Young Reporters—Camille and Julia added their final flair, creating a bespoke mural design that has invigorated the room. Regularly meeting to develop their skills and share their stories, the Young Reporters now have a vibrant platform from which to launch their voices before the world.

“I particularly enjoyed connecting with people from a completely different place to where I’m from, sharing moments of happiness, and working together to create something beautiful.” Camille Walala

“It was a pleasure to be able to contribute something to the training centre and the cause. It was truly an eye-opening experience with some very mixed emotions that we will always remember. Truly inspiring!” Julia Jomaa

In the wake of the Summer Skills Workshop, the Umoja Training Centre bears the inimitable visual footprint of Camille Walala. All of our beneficiaries on Ukerewe Island can now enjoy access to this freshly renovated facility, whose new installations and flashes of colour will inspire for generations to come.