The different violence regime changes we know studying history even growing up what we learned was mainly the dark side, War, Drought, Immigration. This is how even the international media portrays Ethiopia, Africa in general for the outside world. It is always impoverished and an external gaze of thinking about oppression other than much more complex life going on there. And, just reducing it to one easy sensational figure of the starving child. But at the same time people lived lives really worth remembering and they even feel very nostalgic talking about it. They were getting married, traveling for studying, starting up businesses, making family,
The inspiration for this project is an ongoing engagement which I have been undertaking of collecting extensive digital archiving since 2012. This is an attempt to give a practical response to the collection of photos to examine the relationship between personal and social histories. also considered to be as an alternative presentation of a book series, by creating a visual extension into large scale installation. since the aura on the photos is embedded with narratives and contradictions past to the present, in a manner, the viewer can experience it by walking through it and not necessarily by looking at it in small scale. The wallpaper installation is mainly consisting of hundreds of black and white photographs printed in A4 paper, pinned onto the wall covering almost the entire space in a way the photographs create a visual regeneration of human histories and the future. These photos are also amassed in a handmade archival book project, containing an encyclopaedic range collection, stretching from the mid 19th century ethnographic studies to recent iconic photographs of Ethiopians and historical figures, as well as significant historical moments. The archive is collected from several sources, including thought-provoking images of online archives, found images appropriated from public libraries, and snapshots collected from different people, interviews, historians, institutes…These archives are bodies of memory, so it's interesting to revisit what changed and what state say the same
The inspiration for this project is an ongoing engagement which I have been undertaking of collecting extensive digital archiving since 2012. This is an attempt to give a practical response to the collection of photos to examine the relationship between personal and social histories. also considered to be as an alternative presentation of a book series, by creating a visual extension into large scale installation. since the aura on the photos is embedded with narratives and contradictions past to the present, in a manner, the viewer can experience it by walking through it and not necessarily by looking at it in small scale. The wallpaper installation is mainly consisting of hundreds of black and white photographs printed in A4 paper, pinned onto the wall covering almost the entire space in a way the photographs create a visual regeneration of human histories and the future. These photos are also amassed in a handmade archival book project, containing an encyclopaedic range collection, stretching from the mid 19th century ethnographic studies to recent iconic photographs of Ethiopians and historical figures, as well as significant historical moments. The archive is collected from several sources, including thought-provoking images of online archives, found images appropriated from public libraries, and snapshots collected from different people, interviews, historians, institutes…These archives are bodies of memory, so it's interesting to revisit what changed and what state say the same