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What Happens When I Try to Remember
Ssempijja is a Ugandan contemporary artist, choreographer, and researcher working across dance, performance, film, installation, objects and material practices. His work has developed from a background in movement and choreography towards an expanded practice that also considers objects, images, architecture and cultural materials. Since 2024, he has been a member of the Sweden Based Collective at the International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo), a project dedicated to collective authorship and international knowledge transfer, coordinated by ilDance.
In What Happens When I Try to Remember, Ssempijja shares works and processes from his practice and introduces The Ugandan Pathology, an ongoing framework through which he looks at Uganda’s past and its contemporary realities, and how they can be approached through artistic research and making.
Through selected works, images and material experiments, he reflects on what happens when remembering becomes part of the artistic process. How can an object, image, or material hold something difficult to articulate? What can making reveal that research alone cannot?
The talk moves between movement, material, objects, and research, offering insight into how Ssempijja develops works from encounters with memory, cultural objects, archives, and the spaces around him. Ssempijja also includes impressions and references from his work in iCoDaCo with 10 artist collectives across Europe, particularly focusing on political bodies and how that links to his own practice.
iCoDaCo is co-funded by EU.
📅 Tuesday 20 October 2026
⏱️ 13:00-14:30
📍 The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås
What Happens When I Try to Remember
Ssempijja is a Ugandan contemporary artist, choreographer, and researcher working across dance, performance, film, installation, objects and material practices. His work has developed from a background in movement and choreography towards an expanded practice that also considers objects, images, architecture and cultural materials. Since 2024, he has been a member of the Sweden Based Collective at the International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo), a project dedicated to collective authorship and international knowledge transfer, coordinated by ilDance.
In What Happens When I Try to Remember, Ssempijja shares works and processes from his practice and introduces The Ugandan Pathology, an ongoing framework through which he looks at Uganda’s past and its contemporary realities, and how they can be approached through artistic research and making.
Through selected works, images and material experiments, he reflects on what happens when remembering becomes part of the artistic process. How can an object, image, or material hold something difficult to articulate? What can making reveal that research alone cannot?
The talk moves between movement, material, objects, and research, offering insight into how Ssempijja develops works from encounters with memory, cultural objects, archives, and the spaces around him. Ssempijja also includes impressions and references from his work in iCoDaCo with 10 artist collectives across Europe, particularly focusing on political bodies and how that links to his own practice.
iCoDaCo is co-funded by EU.
📅 Tuesday 20 October 2026
⏱️ 13:00-14:30
📍 The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås