Sustaining the Otherwise is an ambitious transnational research and curatorial programme unfolding across Africa and Europe throughout 2026. Bringing together artists, institutions and thinkers across multiple sites, the programme expands the conversation around restitution beyond the physical return of cultural objects. Instead, it considers restitution as a lived, embodied and relational practice—one shaped by memory, knowledge systems, labour, refusal, cultural continuity and the rebuilding of relationships disrupted by colonial histories.
The programme began in Amsterdam with Practising Freedom and Refusal at Metro54, featuring AYO, Masimba Hwati, Christian Nyampeta, Adeju Thompson and Helena Uambembe, before moving to Zambia through Resisting Unfreedom at the Lusaka Contemporary Art Center (LuCAC). Throughout 2026, Sustaining the Otherwise continues across Uganda, Oslo, Nairobi, Lagos, Benin City and Amsterdam through exhibitions, performances, publications, residencies and interdisciplinary gatherings. Rather than proposing a single definition of restitution, these interconnected programmes ask what return, repair and restoration might look like when objects are only one part of what has been displaced.
It was within this wider framework that interdisciplinary artist Nyugen E. Smith undertook a six-week residency at LuCAC from April 20 to May 31, 2026. Working across drawing, sculpture, assemblage, performance and installation, Smith’s practice frequently engages memory, migration, Black identity, ritual, colonial histories and the African diaspora. In Lusaka, he allowed the environment of the residency—its soil, discarded materials, conversations, histories and rhythms of everyday life—to become active participants in his process. Two bodies of work emerged prominently: Stranger Faces (After Serpell) and Where the Body Ends and the World Begins.
Stranger Faces (After Serpell) developed from Smith’s interest in the face as unstable and continually in process, informed by his reading of Zambian-American writer Namwali Serpell and an online conversation between Serpell and writer Chris Abani. Using a fire pit on the grounds of LuCAC, Smith moved sheets of paper through soil, charcoal, pastel, glass and debris, producing marks he initially understood as landscapes. Through prolonged looking, faces began to emerge. Rather than imposing a predetermined image onto the paper, Smith searched for forms already suggested by the accumulated marks. Alongside these drawings, discarded tree limbs became the basis of Where the Body Ends and the World Begins, sculptural assemblages held together through gravity, tension, balance and mutual support rather than conventional hardware. Together, the two bodies of work explore recognition, memory, material and the relationship between bodies and place.
In conversation with Africans Column, Smith discusses what Lusaka taught him, the unexpected origins of Stranger Faces, the histories contained within soil, Africa as a site of knowledge production, and why he understands his repeated return to the continent as part of a wider conversation around restitution.
Africans Column: This was your first time in Zambia and your first experience in that part of the continent. How did those six weeks in Lusaka shape your thinking and artistic process?
Nyugen E. Smith: The experience happened on multiple levels. One was the creative level—the work that I made and the community of creatives I was able to interact with. I was also learning more about the institutions that exist there.
I was really excited to see and learn about what is happening in Zambia overall. LuCAC also partners with different institutions in Livingstone and other parts of Zambia.
Having access to the studio and the grounds of the residency was incredibly inviting, warm and hospitable. The beautiful library at LuCAC was also a great resource during my residency.
The way the space has developed over the years means that you have many people constantly coming in and out. At first, it took me a little while to get used to having so many people around while I was working, but eventually that became a really important part of the experience because it was about learning.
People were very open to sharing their knowledge about the history of Zambia, politics, the creative industries and the creative legacies within the country. Overall, it was a really amazing experience.
Africans Column: Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift and Stranger Faces became important companions during the residency. When did you encounter her work, and how did it begin influencing what you were making in Lusaka?
Nyugen E. Smith: Before I went to Zambia, I started doing some research about the history of the country and learning a little about Lusaka as a city. Then I started looking at some of the contemporary artists and writers.
I came across Serpell’s work before I left and started doing a deeper dive. I watched some of her talks online. I started reading The Old Drift before I arrived, and I watched an online conversation she had about Stranger Faces. I hadn’t actually read Stranger Faces at that point.
The two major bodies of work that I made there were heavily inspired by her writing. Stranger Faces and The Old Drift were essentially companions to me as I made this new body of work.
Africans Column: Portraiture and figuration have appeared throughout your practice, but in Stranger Faces the face becomes something unstable—appearing, disappearing and having to be rediscovered. How did these faces first emerge?
Nyugen E. Smith: Portraiture and figuration have been part of my practice over the years. Sometimes I work with them and sometimes I leave them alone, so it isn’t something entirely new to my practice.
But what happened in Lusaka was that I started making these landscape drawings. There is a fire pit outside the studio. On my first day there, I looked at it and thought it would be a nice place to come and sit whenever I wanted to take a break from working inside the studio.
The more I stared at it, though, I began noticing the charcoal from people having burned wood there at some point, and then there was the soil. I started looking at those two substances as mediums for drawing because I already use soil in my work as a pigment.
I thought, what if I drop a couple of pieces of pastel in there to add a hint of colour, put the paper down and move it around arbitrarily?
I flipped the paper over and looked at the marks that had been made, and there were these amazing, beautiful abstractions. I thought, all right, these are landscape drawings. Let’s call them landscape drawings.
I made about ten of them. The more I stared at them, the more I started to see faces emerge.
Africans Column: Serpell is interested not simply in what faces look like, but in the psychology of how we read them. How did those ideas influence what you were discovering in the drawings?
Nyugen E. Smith: One of the things that comes up when she talks about the psychology of faces is that, as human beings, we’re constantly trying to ascertain what another person is thinking or feeling. We’re trying to read between the lines based on their facial expressions.
And a lot of times, we get it wrong.
As I was looking at the faces emerging from these landscapes, I was contending with that. I was thinking about how the faces shift. Sometimes I would blink my eyes and lose the face that I had just been seeing. Then I would have to find it again.
That became the beginning of the process. After that, it became about trying to articulate the face—adding a little mark or some gesso to make it come forward, or collaging pieces of paper that had gone through the same process to help the face emerge. That was one of the challenges.
Africans Column: Traditional portraiture often begins with a subject that the artist is attempting to represent. Your process begins without knowing what face will appear. What does that difference open up for you?
Nyugen E. Smith: It goes back to a philosophical question of whether that thing already exists and whether we, as artists, are simply the vehicle or medium through which something that already exists comes to fruition.
I think that’s more evident in my process than it might be in traditional portraiture, where there is a subject that the artist is working to create an image of. The source is sitting in front of the artist.
With my process, I don’t know. I have to find the face that emerges from it.
Africans Column: The fire pit eventually becomes much more than a source of material. It carries evidence of people gathering, conversations and previous activity at LuCAC. What does the soil of a place hold for you?
Nyugen E. Smith: I always think about what soil holds.
The soil in a place holds the history of that location. You have the DNA that’s inside the soil, the energy that’s in the soil and the history that’s in the soil.
But then you also have the fact that around this pit, there have been years of conversations, years of dialogue and years of sharing.
So I believe that the pit is also absorbing those energies. The work itself becomes very site-sensitive. Those works could never have happened anywhere else.
Africans Column: Do the people who gathered there and the histories embedded within that land then become, in some way, co-authors of the work?
Nyugen E. Smith: Yes, absolutely. And they’re also a record of time.
I’m fascinated by this process and by the work that has emerged from it. I’m now actively thinking about what it means to recreate this kind of environment in different locations in order to make this kind of work.
I’m thinking about this process as a way of perhaps bringing forth the memory—or the images—of those who occupied that land, those who lived there and those who passed through there.
I’m also thinking about how this process could become a kind of record keeper in other locations.
Africans Column: Sustaining the Otherwise asks us to understand restitution beyond the physical return of objects. Where do you see your own practice within that expanded understanding of restitution?
Nyugen E. Smith: First of all, the objects are being brought back because they were taken in the first place. And just as Africans and African descendants were taken, I see my practice as one of constant return, where physically, my body as an African descendant continues to return to Africa.
I think that, in and of itself, is one of those things that relates to restitution because they took our pride in being African.
When I was young, “African booty scratcher” was a term that was used. There was the way Africa was vilified and the racist comments that kids would make in schools against Black people.
So me reclaiming that pride in Africa, and me returning, is part of this conversation about restitution. I think that’s a big part of it.
Then there is also the idea of collaboration—people coming together to engage with ideas while restitution becomes a central theme. Through gathering, other things become possible.
Africans Column: That idea of return is particularly interesting. What has being in Zambia taught you about Africa as a site of knowledge production rather than simply somewhere people travel to research?
Nyugen E. Smith: I think about it within the specific context of Africa, but I would also put it within the context of the whole. When we go to different places, each place is a repository of specific kinds of knowledge.
I’ll give you an example. Going to Lusaka and beginning to have conversations, I didn’t know there were so many cultural overlaps between Congo and Zambia.
For a long time, I’ve been researching and looking at the Lukasa, an object and memory board that I learned about through Congo, and I’ve been employing that in my work. Then I came to find out that, culturally, the Lukasa also extends into Zambia.
It becomes about learning histories and understanding interconnectedness.
I think every place is its own repository of knowledge. Going to these places opens you up to receiving these pieces of history, which you can bring together and use in your own way.
Africans Column: You’ve also spent time elsewhere on the continent, including Cairo. How do the differences between these places affect how you understand and respond to a landscape?
Nyugen E. Smith: There are drastic differences. One example is a two-month residency I did in Cairo, Egypt, two years ago.
I can start simply by talking about the sonics of the landscape. Egypt is predominantly Muslim, and specifically in Cairo, the call to prayer through megaphones is all around the landscape. You’re constantly hearing it.
You’re hearing the call to prayer through the megaphones closest to you, but you’re also hearing its echo and reverberation from elsewhere. That isn’t in Lusaka.
So we can even start with the sonics of a landscape.
Africans Column: What surprised you most during your six weeks in Lusaka?
Nyugen E. Smith: I’ve always read and heard about Africa being such a young continent in terms of the age of its population.
Being in Lusaka, the majority of the creatives I was in conversation and community with were probably between 25 and 35. I’m 50.
So immediately you recognise that age difference among the people around you. But age was not determinant of their level of intelligence, their knowledge of culture and history or anything like that.
That was a surprise—to experience the youth in that way, to be integrated into their conversations, to go into their studios, see what they’re making and understand what they’re thinking about through their work.
Africans Column: When someone encounters Stranger Faces, what do you ultimately want them to carry away from the experience?
Nyugen E. Smith: One thing is: don’t believe the face.
As much as the face reveals, it also hides. I remember someone once telling me during a conversation, “I can’t read you.” I understood what they meant because I was intentionally keeping a deadpan expression, even though I might have been very excited about what they were saying.
So the face can be deceiving.
I also think it is worthwhile to give something a second look, because sometimes you don’t see what is right in front of you the first time. It takes giving something your focused attention and spending time with it.
That applies to people too—spending time with them, getting to know them better and understanding them more deeply.
That’s something I learned through the process of making these drawings because I had to stare at these landscapes for a long time before I could actually see the faces emerge.
Africans Column: Finally, how would you like people to think differently about restitution after encountering this work and the wider Sustaining the Otherwise programme?
Nyugen E. Smith: I think it’s important to keep as part of the conversation that restitution is not all about the object.
From Lusaka to Maine
The experimental drawing process Smith developed at LuCAC is already moving into another geography. He is now participating in Interco(a)stal: Reading Between the Ribs of Maine’s Maritime History, a yearlong collaborative project in Bath, Maine, culminating in an event on October 17, 2026.
Bringing together artists, historians, Black and Wabanaki community members, knowledge keepers, archivists, researchers, museum professionals, students and local residents, Interco(a)stal examines Maine’s maritime history through interconnected histories of enslavement, colonisation, labour, migration, ecology and resistance. The project has been selected as one of ten projects nationwide for Monument Lab’s 2026 Re:Generation cohort, an initiative supporting community-centred approaches to monuments and public memory.
For the project, Smith is extending the process first developed in the fire pit at LuCAC through Stranger Faces (After Serpell), Maine Edition. The new iteration turns the process towards overlooked histories within Black and Indigenous maritime worlds, searching for faces that might emerge through material encounters with another landscape.
The development is significant because it answers a question Smith was already beginning to ask in Lusaka. During the interview, he described thinking about what might happen if he recreated this process in other locations, allowing it to function as a kind of record keeper for those who had occupied, lived in or passed through a place. Maine now becomes the next testing ground for that proposition: the method remains, but the material, histories and faces it might reveal belong to another landscape.
What’s Next for Nyugen E. Smith
Smith’s wider programme continues across museum exhibitions, historical projects and public art. From October 15, 2026 to June 2, 2027, he will participate in Dreamtime in Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey. The group exhibition examines the legacy of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, and its role in supporting artists and contributing to the development of global contemporary art.
His work also forms part of the travelling group and historical exhibition In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World, which will be presented in Dakar through the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire with the Musée des Civilisations Noires from January to April 2027.
Smith is additionally participating in Re|Sounding at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, from November 15, 2026 into 2027. His engagement with public space can currently be encountered through The Art of the Game, a public art programme presented by ARTS 14C in partnership with the New York New Jersey 2026 World Cup Host Committee. One of 23 participating artists, Smith created a six-foot outdoor football sculpture titled This One’s for You, installed at City Hall in downtown Jersey City and on view through September 7, 2026.
Taken together, these projects extend many of the concerns that surfaced during Smith’s residency in Lusaka: movement, memory, return, public encounter and the relationship between bodies and place. The continuation of the Stranger Faces process in Maine is particularly revealing. What began through an encounter with a fire pit in Zambia is becoming a method through which Smith can enter into dialogue with the accumulated histories of different landscapes.
Stranger Faces ultimately leaves a deceptively simple proposition: looking is not the same as seeing. The face, like history, does not surrender its meaning immediately. It requires attention, time and sometimes a second encounter.
Smith’s final observation brings that proposition back to Sustaining the Otherwise. If restitution is “not all about the object,” then its possibilities extend beyond the movement of cultural material from one institution or geography to another. Restitution can also require renewed attention to memory, knowledge, relationships, dignity, place and return—to what has survived, what has been obscured, and what might become visible when we learn to look again.
