The LAT Art Centre:

Activities At the Center:
One of the major reasons why we chose this particular area for the centre is its location and endowment with local natural materials for making art.  Secondly, for a long period of time there have been talented women and men that make crafts from local materials in the area.  However, most of the older people involved in craft making, have either died or are too old to work optimally, yet the young people are either oblivious or disinterested in their parents’ talents and skills.

This is therefore a timely project to mobilize the old folks to pass on their skills for posterity as well as help them improve or alter their crafts to suit modern day living needs.  Kibinge sub-county was once renowned for growing coffee which was Uganda’s leading export. It is now one of the most economically hit areas of Uganda owing to the slump in the coffee industry. However, as Uganda struggles to revive the coffee industry, there is an urgent need to mobilize people who had lost hope in their coffee, as well as find alternative income-generating activities.

We therefore, besides mobilizing people through art at the centre, envisage contributing towards this cause by introducing the craft of making paper from the abundant local materials like banana fibers, papyrus, and elephant grass as well as encourage the communities to grow more pineapples which can help to improve their diets and incomes as well as provide the cutoffs and leaves for the handmade paper project.

The craft of barkcloth making is one of Uganda’s unique heritages but sadly it is dying out. There is therefore urgent need for its revival by encouraging skills transfer from the older generation to the young one. We therefore envisage promoting bark cloth making by creating a bark cloth making section at the Art Centre.