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Youth Jury

Memory Books. Álvaro Laiz & David Rengel

Exhibition
April 1 – May 20
FNAC

memory books

The NACWOLA organisation (National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda), currently encompassing 40,000 women either infected by HIV or suffering from AIDS, was created 18 years ago in Uganda. This voluntary organisation provides the women not only with social and psychological support, but also with training to help them find work and therefore increase their autonomy within the family.

Naturally, helped by European health and psychology workers, the association came up with the idea of these Memory Books. The mechanism was simple: to write down all the things these mothers or grandmothers could never tell their offspring while they were still alive and to explain what they expected of them. It is like a collection of memories, a mothers’ survival handbook on aspects that would otherwise be lost forever.

In 2009, the photographers Álvaro Laiz and David Rengel, both members of the AN HUA Association, spent two months in Uganda learning more about and documenting the Memory Books project.