Rebel Lives

The Fotomuseum Antwerp (FOMU) asked us to create a digital translation of Georges Senga’s powerful research project, “Rebel Lives: Photographs from inside the Lord’s Resistance Army”. The LRA is a rebel group in Uganda, notorious for its use of extreme violence and its large-scale abductions of children, who were used as child soldiers or forced to become “wives”.

What made this project challenging — and all the more rewarding — was how to turn a vast offline exhibition into a compelling digital experience. Since there was such a wealth of personal photo portraits and written testimonials, we spent weeks “wireframing” the hierarchy of information, choosing the right visuals, and designing the layered narrative arch of the story — all the time making sure to treat this sensitive and personal story with the utmost respect.

As readers scroll through the story, they are confronted with portraits of the people whose lives have been uprooted by turmoil and violence. These photos are interspersed with powerful bold quotes, as well as longer paragraphs of text to sketch the context. We opted to juxtapose the collected smaller “archive” images with the full-bleed contemporary photography by Georges Senga. This approach provides for a dynamic and layered storytelling experience.

“It was wonderful to witness how the complex and layered project Rebel Lives transformed into an online platform. Although it was originally a book and an exhibition, AWE fulfilled the challenge to present the content as an autonomous online entity. The respect the entire team had for the content was the basis for this fruitful collaboration. Highly recommended.”