Rwanda
Impressions from Kigali

Bonnie and Clyde, teenage life, womanhood, friendship, collective trauma and the dream of artistic visibility - these are the themes on which stories became visible in the Rwandan AFRICOMICS workshop. The ten participants learned that comics are not only for Spiderman and Wonder Woman, but that they themselves can become protagonists to tell their personal stories. Dolph Banza and Sebastian Lörscher accompanied them and taught them how imaginations and visions can be powerfully presented in pictures. They also taught them that they have the potential to create thought-provoking ideas, identity and change.

The workshop facilitators

© Dolph Banza Dolph Banza is Rwandan visual artist who is passionate about storytelling. Banza was among the first Rwandans to adopt digital illustration as a medium of communication and although he masters many visual arts like graphic design and animation, he remains committed to a practice he has been experimenting with ever since he could hold a pencil: illustration. Dolph has illustrated numerous educational materials and children's books some of which are used in the Rwandan educational curriculum. Despite having an engineering training, Dolph made a risky decision to pursue illustration despite the fact that it was not considered as a profession in his country until recently. Actually, Dolph runs a creative communication agency called InkStain where he and his team help organisations and individuals to express themselves using illustration and animation. In Rwanda the main function of illustration is empowerment or behaviour change education. For almost 10 years Dolph's work has reached many Rwandans in the most remote areas having a life changing impact. The future of Dolph's career is more oriented towards African historical exploration using storytelling through technical drawing, fantasy art and animation. Dolph Banza is fascinated by ancient African arts like mask curving and architectural weaving, he believes that the geometrical information found in the ancient African arts can inspire Africa’s modern design thinking.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM

© Sebastian Lörscher Sebastian Lörscher, born in Paris in 1985 and raised near Munich, is a draughtsman and author living in Berlin. He studied visual communication at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg and at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art. His graphic novels have received numerous awards (including the Sondermann Prize and from the Stiftung Buchkunst) and are published by various publishers in Germany and France. Lörscher's most recent works deal in particular with the medium of drawn reportage. With pen and sketchbook, he roams distant countries and records his impressions in drawings, texts and image sequences made on site. He tells of them in his books and in staged readings on German stages. His most recent projects have taken him to Bangalore in southern India, to the Caribbean state of Haiti, through wild Austria and most recently to Nigeria. He works for his clients in the fields of illustration and graphic recording and gives all kinds of workshops on drawing and storytelling.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM