Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Living in New York I had a small space. As a dedicated painter I was making almost a painting a day, my studio was swarmed with them. I incidentally ran into action animation, which became my main interest, while trying to make an illustration based on a folktale from Ethiopia. I stapled a canvas to a wall, painted a scene, took a picture of it and painted the next frame on top of it. I was glad to find this process, since it only required a single canvas. Intuitively, the process was also relevant to me. As an Ethiopian living in the US, my past experience is physically removed, only existing as a memory or in story form. For me, time and place are no longer singular. Ethiopia follows the Julian calendar, which is seven years behind; when I came to the US, years were skipped. Painting’s fixed time and place were no longer true for me. I found myself in a continuous adjustment and dialogue, negotiating between here and there, past and present, the tactile and the digital. I keep finding inspiration in making animation, as it is a suitable media for me to navigate the states of in-between.
In 2004 I travelled throughout Ethiopia for over four months, collecting folktales using a video recorder. I went to storytellers' houses, who generously shared their knowledge with me. I became interested in the experiential aspect of the stories. Sometimes I would find the same story told in different regions, but changed or adapted. I believe that, along with the collective knowledge of a folktale, there is also the individual storytellers' morphing or personalization of the story. Now I'm making animations from these folktales, not to define them, but to be a part of their continuous evolution.
For this project I sent out an open call for folklore to a Habesha diaspora New York City community email group. Habeshas are Ethiopians and Eritreans—it was a name for the people of Ethiopia before the separation of the two countries. In the wake of my earlier exploration, and as an artist of Ethiopian origin living in the US, I thought it would be very interesting to see how folktales from these regions were transferred across the ocean and are now translated.