Imigani

Month of Her is an editorial series by marking International Women’s Day, placing on record the work and perspectives of women shaping the creative industries in Kigali and across the diaspora. The series is presented in collaboration with . Through the series, Imigani documents how their ideas travel, influence, and build cultural presence beyond borders.

Today’s perspective comes from , a self-taught chef and multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between food, styling, and creative direction. Through .official, a roaming live-cooking gathering first launched in Nairobi in 2022 and now rooted in Kigali, she creates spaces where food becomes a way of bringing people together, each edition shaped by its own rhythm, its own setting, its own community.

In today’s perspective, she reflects on creative freedom, on the tension of a kitchen long associated with women, yet dominated by men when it comes to chefing, and on the process of building something from very little. She traces Trucs de Ouf back to its simplest beginnings, a hand, a knife, a lighter, and the belief that whatever was there was enough, and how from that, something entirely its own came into form.

Swipe to hear her perspective. Across the carousel, audio moments offer a glimpse into her reflections on authorship, space, and the conditions that shape who gets to cook, create, and be recognised.

Month of Her is an editorial series by marking International Women’s Day, placing on record the work and perspectives of women shaping the creative industries in Kigali and across the diaspora. The series is presented in collaboration with . Through the series, Imigani documents how their ideas travel, influence, and build cultural presence beyond borders.

Today’s perspective comes from .gretta , a poet, writer, and performer based in Kigali.

She returns to a moment from high school, when she was first introduced to Nyirarumaga, a poetess connected to the origins of ubusizi, the Rwandan poetic tradition. Having grown up perceiving poetry as something largely associated with men, she describes the force of discovering a woman linked not only to poetry itself, but to the formation of an uruhondo, a lineage of poets transmitting history, culture, and memory through oral expression.

At the time, her relationship to poetry felt personal, instinctive, something she carried without a clear sense of where it came from or whether it belonged to her. Nyirarumaga changed that. What the discovery made visible was that what she had experienced as solitary was in fact part of something older. A continuity. A lineage. Something that existed before her, and that she could now claim as her own.

Swipe to hear her perspective. Across the carousel, audio moments offer a glimpse into her thoughts on poetry, transmission, and the ways cultural memory is carried, inherited, and recognised.

Month of Her is an editorial series by marking International Women’s Day, placing on record the work and perspectives of women shaping the creative industries in Kigali and across the diaspora. The series is presented in collaboration with .

Through the series, documents how their ideas travel, influence, and build cultural presence beyond borders.

Today’s reflection comes from .muteteri.heremans, a film director whose practice draws from art history and looks at how images shape the perception of places and societies. Her work constructs cinematic narratives through archival material and montage.

In today’s reflection, she speaks about the conditions of working as a woman filmmaker, and the questions that emerge when creative practice meets the realities of life. Moving through the pace of filmmaking, production, montage, and festival circuits, she reflects on financial instability, time, and the possibility of starting a family alongside a life in film. Her perspective considers how these timelines intersect, and how the structure of the industry shapes what remains possible, visible, or unspoken for women navigating both creative work and motherhood.

Swipe to hear her perspective. Across the carousel, audio moments offer a glimpse into her reflections on precarity, time, and the lived realities of sustaining a life in film, and the questions that continue to shape how women position themselves within it.