Your Space Or Mine

Magda Kaggwa

Activists and allies across the world have been catalysed to come together in support of anti-racism in all areas with many working tirelessly to highlight Black voices in the arts. London-based artist Magda Kaggwa is one of them. An arts professional who works across event production, exhibition coordination and curation, Kaggwa previously worked as a printmaker for artists including huge names like Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, but now focuses on platforming Black creatives and those from underrepresented backgrounds. She also releases a newsletter every fortnight highlighting Black creative practitioners.

For our Your Space Or Mine series, we at BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaborated with Kaggwa to bring her message to the street via art in our billboard spaces in London, Bristol, Glasgow and Cardiff. Kaggwa’s piece began life as a mural painted in Deptford: “The lockdown restrictions in London at the time of conceiving this project were much stricter, and like many people, I was still spending a lot of time at home consuming hours of social media content following the wave of global civil rights protests,” says Kaggwa on the art’s origin.

“The resource sharing posts and images of crowds waving placards were alluding to a shift in consciousness, but it was only once I started seeing posters in people’s windows during walks around my local area that it began to feel like something tangible outside of my Instagram echo chamber was actually changing,” she adds. As more and more people who had previously been either “apathetic or ignorant to the systemic and institutional scale of racism” were waking up to it, Kaggwa felt a strong current of hope under her despair and exhaustion. She wanted to bring that feeling to others on a large scale, so asked her friend Naomi Edmondson, who runs legal street art project Survival Techniques to collaborate with her.