Tightropes, Chit Chats and the Odd Faux Pas

Devoted followers of my blog (ha!) will note that I am quite terrible at updating it. That I am into my third month here and this is only my third update from Addis is, of course, entirely unacceptable. Somewhat legitimate excuses abound; they range from the rather unpleasant (suffering two bouts of food poisoning and a couple of nasty colds) to the wonderfully indulgent (entertaining a dear friend from London for 10 days) to the downright mundane (simple disorganization mixed with spotty internet access limited to occasional frivolous social network updates). In truth, I just need to get a little more in the habit of recording day to day occurrences. It’s a cliché but life is flying by here. My very early New Year’s resolution is to be a much better blogger...

Excuses and wot not aside, there have been some major highlights in the five or six weeks since I last wrote. First, there was the wedding of Fitsum and Samarawit, to which I was invited by my friend Sarah (who has known Fitsum for several years). Mindful of the fact that Ethiopian weddings are elaborate affairs and guests are always impeccably dressed, I of course panicked about what to wear. Sadly I had not brought wedding-suitable attire from London and I knew that my rainy-season battered boots and scruffy jeans were grossly inappropriate for everyday attire, let alone a glamorous Ethiopian couple's special day. With Sarah in tow I found a local dressmaker, Mulu, who made me a simple traditional dress (“habesha libs”) out of local fabric, edged with red and gold. Typically, women wear white dresses, elaborately edged with gorgeous metallic threaded designs and accessorized with a matching Natella (scarf) or Gabi (a much thicker shawl). I decided to go for a color rather than white; it was only when I got the dress home that I worried that the green, red and gold ensemble evoked Mrs Claus or a Christmas elf.

Ho ho ho?

Sarah, rightfully, pointed out that this combo was also the Ethiopian national colors, and that I was probably worrying too much. At the wedding itself we had a fabulous day. We trawled all over town from photo spots to drinks receptions and finally ended up at an 800-guest reception where we ate injera, marveled at the glitz of it all and danced the eskista into the midnight hour. 
The only moment of anxiety was when we rocked up 20 minutes late for the reception (having indulged in an extra beer at the Hilton) only to find that there were no seats left for us. To our shame Fitsum’s relatives insisted on finding a tiny table-for-two, covering it in a slightly tatty table cloth, evicting a couple of lesser guests from their chairs and plonking us in the VIP section, next to unimpressed aunts, uncles and cousins. We smiled sheepishly, and sipped some tejj, hoping the omnipresent video camera (and massive wall-projected live feed) had not captured our epic cultural faux pas. With the help of Johnny Walker (the whiskey of choice in Addis) we drowned our embarrassment.

The second major highlight was the opening of the Elias Sime exhibition entitled ‘Tightrope.’ Opening simultaneously at the four big European cultural institutes in Addis – the British Council, the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institute and the Italian Cultural Institute – the curatorial vision was as vast and ambitious as the contents of the show. The former belonged to Meskerem Assegued, one of Ethiopia’s (and, frankly, Africa’s) leading curators, and a warm and generous human being. Meskerem has had a long-running creative partnership with Elias, an equally affable and talented individual. In each of the four sites that constituted ‘Tightrope’ Meskerem had installed Elias’ massive, elaborate, richly colorful works that consisted of hundreds of recycled computer motherboards, electrical wires and other technical paraphernalia. Hung like three-dimensional painterly canvases, Elias used the motherboards to evoke dense urban maps and aerial views of rich topographies. He took seven years to collect the material he needed to make each of the nearly 20 massive works, the complexity of which was quite breathtaking on close inspection.

Details from Elias Sime's "Tightrope"

For the opening we were shepherded from one cultural institute to another in quick succession in an open-top double decker bus; this exhaust-fume rich traversing of the town, past ripped up roads and half-finished sky scrapers, kept fresh the images of Addis as a place of rapidly (and sometimes awkwardly) change that resonated closely with Elias imagined city-scapes. As he discussed in a subsequent artist talk at the Alliance, his title ‘Tightrope’ was chosen to evoke the precariousness of rapid infrastructure building and of the influx of global technologies into developing economies; to be successful and beneficial, everything, he said, must be in balance. Whether or not Addis’ city planners are successfully walking the tightrope of urban development is currently a hot topic of debate. Since I live in the ever-changing construction site of Hayahulet, I found Elias’ work and his explication of it to be particularly compelling.

Immediately after the opening I fired off an email to Meskerem, introducing myself and enthusing about the exhibition. To my delight she replied very promptly, inviting me for lunch, introducing me to Elias and enthusiastically encouraging my research. In the past few weeks she has been instrumental in acquainting me with other artists and academics, and in return, I will be reviewing ‘Tightrope’ for African Arts magazine. [Spoiler alert: the show was awesome.]

My other highlights have mainly been the conversations I have had about my research with artists and other academics. Zerihun Yetmgeta showed me the sketches and doodles he used to draw whilst being forced to sit in “Marxist Leninist Discussion Group” at the School of Fine Arts. Esseye Gebre Medhin told me about the excitement of seeing art exhibitions again after the dark days of the violent Red Terror. Eshetu Tiruneh effused about studying in the Soviet Union and about teaching his fellow Russian students about Ethiopian history.

Prof. Bahru Zewde, Ethiopia’s leading historian, told me about the time back in 1973 when he and his fellow Ethiopian students at SOAS in London decided to organize a dinner to draw attention to the famine unfolding in his country. He said they had wanted to confront Haile Selassie’s ambassador to Britain and on the evening Ethiopian dignitaries were invited, but quickly left as soon as they saw that the event was one of protest. Had they stayed, Prof. Bahru told me, they would have been amused by the evenings entertainment because, unable to find Ethiopian musicians, Bahru and his colleagues shortsightedly hired a Rastafarian band…who arrived and, of course, began singing praise songs to man they worshipped as god, Emperor Haile Selassie!

Somewhere, amidst these fascinating and often funny conversations, there are some great nuggets for my dissertation. With only three weeks to go until I fly home to England for Christmas I am permanently anxious about having not achieved enough in these first few months. My progress feels patchy, but I hope very much that these conservations will develop further on my return in the New Year.

Now I must go and do my Amharic homework… I am currently taking an intensive course at the Mekane Yesus Joint Language School. It is, hands down, the best language course in town – a claim I will elaborate on in some future post. Tomorrow I have to present something about a food that is traditional in my culture. Since my classmates are British and Australian, I thought I’d present on food from my beloved adoptive/adopted country – America. And since this week is Thanksgiving, I’m going to tell my classmates (in Amharic) how to make pumpkin pie! To all my friends and family in the good old US of A, have a wonderful day on Thursday and I’ll try to do justice to one of your most delicious feasting staples in my presentation.

From Fresh Ricotta to Lenin Woodcuts

Since I last wrote, I am one year older and two weeks wiser (perhaps). Over the last 13 years I’ve regularly moved to a new place for the start of the school year, and this often coincides with my birthday. Every time this happens I’ve had low expectations for marking the day, not wanting to assume that people I’ve only just met would be interested in celebrating. Yet every time I’ve been in this situation, I’ve had a great day – from Pollock Halls in Edinburgh, to the 'international student' gathering in Virginia, to that wonderful dinner in Cambridge, MA, to beers at the Nut House in Palo Alto back in 2009. This year in Addis was no exception and huge thanks go to more new friends - Sarah, Tom, Lindsey, Ian, Anthony, Gareth and Bindi - for a 31^st birthday that took several days to recover from!

 I spent the actual day seeing a couple of exhibitions. Firstly, the collection at the National Museum, with its smattering of C20th works and imperial era remnants, and then contemporary painter Tewodoros Hagos’ show at the Alliance Ethio-Francaise (the French cultural institute, whose library I have just joined). These rather wholesome pursuits were counterbalanced by an evening of pure indulgence with Sarah and Tom which began with a couple of bottles of St George at a little bar in Piassa, then progressed onto Castelli's (an Addis institution) and ended with late night brandies and great conversation. Castelli's, which has been open in Piassa since 1948, is quite the fine dining experience, complete with impeccably dressed waiters and crisp white tablecloths. Jimmy Carter has been here, as has Brad Pitt, and Bob ‘give us yer f***ing money’ Geldof says its his favorite restaurant in town. It did not disappoint.

Run by the same Italian family for 65 years, its menu ranges from extraordinary antipasto to homemade linguine with truffle and cream sauce. The former involves going to a buffet of delights, from grilled eggplant and zucchini to fresh ricotta and mozzarella, which is then liberally sprinkled with fine olive oil and seasoned. To this you can add a platter of prosciutto or other sliced, cured meats. For our feast, we washed this (and a couple of plates of pasta) down with some tasty Italian red, but sadly had no room for a slab of tiramisu. I will pace myself better next time. Demand for tables is high at Castelli's; I recommend that you don’t turn up five minutes late, as we did, unless you want to be scolded by the owner!

A couple of days after our Ethio-Italian gastronomic adventures, I had another (slightly less civilised) celebration that involved a small tour of Addis’s nocturnal offerings, several (later regretted) rounds of cheap tequila and some overly enthusiastic dancing to Nigerian super group, P-Square. Behold: P-Square Chop My Money

Anyway, besides turning 31, work is beginning to fall into place. My first forays into substantive research have primarily revolved around The Ale School of Fine Arts, which is part of Addis Ababa University. Based at the Arat Kilo campus (just down the road from the main campus at Sidist Kilo), the School’s history spans the past 70 years. Established in 1958 by Ale Feleg Selam, after whom it is now named, it has both educated and been run by many of Ethiopia’s leading artists of the modern era. These include the great Skunder Boghossian, who trained at the Slade in London and taught painting here in the 1950s/60s and - one of my personal favourites - Gebre Kristos Desta, who studied in Germany, was influenced by European expressionist painting and taught here up to the 1970s.

The revolutionary years – those about which my dissertation is concerned – witnessed considerable restructuring at the school. Curricula were soon shifted to reflect the aesthetic needs of the military government, with newfound emphasis, in particular, on graphic printmaking (for mass producible poster designs). The extent to which young artists at the School supported, resisted or even ignored the revolution is the subject of some debate, a debate with which I will be engaging considerably in the coming months.

            After a meeting with the current Director, the artist Berhanu Ashagarie Deribew, I was introduced to the school’s curator, an artist and educator called Makeda. Makeda took me to the painting storerooms of the school, in which several decades worth of graduation works are housed. The storerooms are overwhelming, bursting at the seams with canvases large and small, stacked haphazardly and often subject to considerable damage from the elements. In my first tentative exploration I found some of the earliest graduation works, including portraits of former Emperor Haile Selassie alongside large woodcuts from the era of so-called ‘Ethiopian Marxist Leninism.’ Makeda and I have made an appointment to spend next Saturday in these storerooms, to begin the job of going systematically through the enormous holdings that the school has.

Painting storage, Ale School of Fine Arts.

            The school also has an interesting library, which houses old exhibition catalogues as well as many art books, many of which are foreign donations. Its recent art writings include Chike Okeke and Okwui Enwezor’s volume on contemporary African art, alongside several shelves of ‘art theory’ texts (battered copies of Wofflin, in particular). Browsing the shelves amongst the older books you find multiple copies of certain books that gently infer the cultural Cold War agendas. Several Western art history tomes arrived courtesy of the United States Information Service, whilst it doesn’t take much speculation to imagine where “Militant Graphic Art of Rumania” and David Sisqueiros’ “Art and Revolution” came from.

Inside a book in the SFA library

            I discussed some of these things with the artist Eshetu Tiruneh over coffee last Friday. Famous for his provocative canvas, “Victims of the Famine” (1974), Eshetu is an artist, writer and teacher who lived through the revolutionary years, studied in the Soviet Union and latterly worked for the Ministry of Culture. We met last March when I came to visit and was introduced to him by Asni Gallery director, Konjit Seyoum. Picking up where we had left off last year, Eshetu and I chatted at length about my research and the revolutionary years. Since his collection of both art and writing is so large, we have scheduled a series of weekly meetings during which I can ask whatever I would like, and he will share his expertise and his memories. Such an opportunity is incredibly exciting, and I only hope that I will get to have similar extended conversations with several other key artists, from Taddesse Mesfin to Bekele Mekonnen.

I'll end by sharing my video of the moment that Ethiopia scored against Nigeria last Sunday in the World Cup Qualifier. The vuvuzelas had been blowing from the break of dawn, and face-painted crowds had began to gather at the football stadium the night before the event. On the day, over-packed cars careened through the streets bedecked in flags, horns blaring, and everywhere you looked there were crowds of proud, boisterous Ethiopian fans. It was, therefore, really sad that the Nigerian Super Eagles came from behind to defeat the home team, and (almost) distinguish any hopes of making it to Brazil. Nonetheless, the atmosphere in the bar up to the 90th minute was pretty wonderful; I'd take Ethiopian football fans over English ones any day.

Mud Splattered Beginnings

26^th Sept.

Writing this first, rather general update from Addis has taken longer than expected, but not for want of trying. On two occasions I sat writing in an internet café, only to have the power cut in the middle of my writing. On another I futilely tried to type it on my phone in the only free wifi spot I have yet located. Intermittent power has been a regular feature of my first ten days in Addis; I had assumed this was because of the enduring rains, but an Ethiopian friend of mine suggested that it had more to do with the massive infrastructure building that is going on throughout the city, and that I should expect outages more regularly.  So I stocked up on candles and a cheap, but very effective rechargeable torch.

My neighborhood, Hayahulet, is particularly burdened with this at the moment since the construction of a partially underground train system is in full swing. Five minutes from my house, a gaping hole where the road used to be stretches at least three blocks; the incessant clanging, hammering, scraping of busy workmen and machinery goes from dawn till well after dark. This work makes travelling from my neighborhood more challenging than normal, especially on wet days since it involves a small trek over rather precarious, very muddy ground to get to the other side of the hole. The assumption is that this project, like so many of the building projects in Addis, is a major Chinese initiative. When walking through Hayahulet last weekend a couple of people yelled “China! China!” at me. I’m used to being called a ‘ferengi’ (slang for white person, deriving from ‘Frank’), but being called ‘China’ was striking; in some quarters ‘China’ is apparently displacing ‘ferengi’ as the generic moniker for ‘foreigner.’

Despite the construction work, our neighborhood and our house are great. The latter is an upper floor apartment, which great views out to the hills surrounding Addis. I am already enamored of evenings spent sitting on the little balcony of my bedroom with a book and a glass of wine. We have a nice little restaurant, Zebra Grill, around the corner and wide selection of bars, cafes and (best of all) fresh juice shops (those of you who read my writing last year will remember my joy at discovering the “juice sprisse,” a layered mango, papaya, avocado glassful of heaven). There’s the Axum Hotel with its inexpensive gym and its free wifi (if you buy an expensive coffee), and Meskel Square, the central hub of the city, is a mere 5-10 minute drive. The commute up to Addis Ababa University is a little more taxing, but I’m getting used to riding the two minibuses a day that take me to Sidist Kilo, where it is located. My call of “waradj alle” when I reach my stop seems to be a source of endless amusement to my fellow commuters.

And, the rains appear to be subsiding! Although I shouldn’t speak too soon… When I arrived a daily downpour (or three) was to be expected, but they have been more sporadic of late. When it rains in Addis it begins with three or four large splodges on the pavement, and then the heavens open. I was confused at first when I saw Ethiopians start to sprint for cover as soon as the first drops fell, thinking that surely with an umbrella I could survive. How wrong I was! The rain falls like fast, wet bullets from the sky; it can be hard to control an umbrella while getting pummeled by it. Persevering, soaked to the core, up the road from Arat Kilo I felt like an extra in a Marx Brothers film, and my Ethiopian audience was suitably tickled. Whilst Ethiopian women are very practiced at navigating the ensuing situation under foot, even in delicate ballet pumps, its safe to say that I have spent much of my first ten days with mud-splatters up to my knees and boots that look as if I’ve come straight from the construction site.  Elegance, of course, has never been my strong suit.

So besides all of this, I have begun some work! Last week, the great triumph was to get affiliation as a Visiting Scholar to Addis Ababa University.  The latter is something I knew nothing about before arriving, since it is almost impossible to get such information online. I arrived with a letter of introduction from my department at Stanford and no clue about how I was going to get access to the library and archives. Fortunately, a fellow Brit, Sarah, was subletting a room in my house and, as a graduate student from London, knew far more about the situation after having been in touch with other researchers who had come to Ethiopia. Word of mouth appears to be the only way to get information on a range of practical matters, from affiliation to the university, to which Amharic classes you should / can take. (Next week, I’m going to write a short blog entry on these practical processes, in the hope of more broadly sharing information that I found very difficult to get on my own.)

There are many things that I hope to achieve in the next week, from meeting various key people to getting my residency card. I also plan to brave the Amharic section of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies library, armed with a list of texts that I’m in hot pursuit of (including an Ethiopian article on Lunarcharsky, about which I’m fascinated!)

27^th Sept.

Today is the national holiday of Meskel, or the Finding of the True Cross, which is an Orthodox Christian holiday. This holiday Last night I went down to Meskel Square (the hub that used to be known as Revolution or Abyot Square). With a few of my new friends, I stood in a crowd of (apparently) several hundred thousand people to watch the burning of the Meskel bonfire (demera), understood as reminiscent of the fire burned by Queen Helena, the smoke of which showed the direction of the True Cross. The bonfire is also sometimes understood as an act of cleansing sins. It was a quite spectacular affair, and one in which there is considerable religious song and dance from groups of young men and women of the Orthodox Church. Despite the recent, deeply tragic events in Kenya, people were not discouraged from attending a large-scale public event, and the atmosphere was very festive. Once the bonfire had burned to nothing, and toppled to one side, the fire brigade arrived to extinguish the lingering flames. Soldiers, who has been keeping the crowd at a distant moved out of the way and allowed people to run into the smoldering remains to grab some charcoal. This is then used to mark a cross on the foreheads of the faithful. My friend Ramallah insisted on marking both mine and my friend Victoria’s heads, much to the fascination and amusement of the Ethiopians around us…particularly in the fancy bar, The Black Rose, where we went to eat steak sandwiches after the festivities.

In other news, its my little sister Anna's birthday today! I remember well being taken from school at 6 years old to meet her. Anna, I hope you have a wonderful day!

I promise to try to update this more regularly, particularly from next week when I hope (fingers crossed) to have access to the internet at home.

2006: The Year that Keeps on Giving

On Sunday morning I will arrive in Addis Ababa, and the year will be 2006. Ethiopia, as you may already know, follows a calendar very different to our own Gregorian calendar. Based on the Coptic Calendar, and similar to the Julian one, the Ethiopian calendar is approximately 8 years behind the Gregorian. Each of its years (amet in Amharic) consists of twelve months (wer) of exactly 30 days (qen), and a thirteenth month, known as Pwagame, which consists of five or six days, depending on the year. This week Ethiopia celebrated its New Year or Enqutatash, which occurs on Mesekerem 1 (or September 11th) every year. Typically it marks the end of the rainy season (Kremt) and the start of the flowering season. This year, the rains seems to persist amidst New Year blossoms, but I will shortly be arriving in the earliest days of Ethiopian 2006, itching to get down to work.

The thought of going back (or forward) to 2006 got me thinking last night as I squeezed tea bags into my suitcase. In the Gregorian calendar that was a bit of a ropey year for me. It was the year in which the sheen of graduating from Edinburgh University was fading as all the opportunities I assumed would be laid at my feet did not materialize. I moved down to London and in with my extremely accommodating cousin, having failed to get a job as a part-time receptionist at The List magazine in Edinburgh (which I, obviously, believed was the only path to greatness). I started working for less money than I needed to live on at a Mayfair gallery that I was far too common to be staffing and churned out the odd awkwardly written exhibition review. My family was going through a difficult time and I shamelessly lived for the smorgasbord of free canapes and cheap wine at any art opening my dear friend Katie could get us invitations to. I quickly came to realize that I was neither glamorous nor savvy nor [add your own adjective] enough for the Art World. And to top it off, I was unceremoniously dumped by my first love, calling on his lunch break from his far more exciting job in America. This, naturally, led to several months of insisting that I could never, ever, ever be happy, ever again. I was your classic self-centered, melodramatic Generation Y-er. I probably still am (this particular blog post may corroborate such suspicions), but Gregorian 2006 has gone down, in particular, as my annus horribilis.

 

The late, great Tigger in Gregorian 2006, summing up my thoughts entirely.

This 2006 is going to be quite different. I've been having those disturbed, teeth-grinding nights of sleep that inevitably come before an exciting, yet intimidating move. I've packed and repacked and packed again, anxious about what to take both to survive the end of a very rainy rainy season and to ensure that I make the most of this opportunity to study and learn. I've tried to revise some of my Amharic, although I think anxiety is wreaking havoc with my language recall; I'm relying on the whole "immersion" experience to trigger my memory. I'm squeezing in books I feel I ought to take, and packing the odd photograph to brighten my room.

Its quite strange to be thinking of returning to 2006, since I distinctly remember toasting "good riddance" to it on Gregorian New Year's Eve that year. Funnily enough, it was in the first few weeks of 2007 that everything changed. I got a fellowship to Harvard University, where I enrolled later that year and audited a class on African Craft and Design with Prof. Suzanne Blier. It was this class (and the wonderful professor who taught it) that would radically shift my life path. And it is that same (sometimes meandering) path that has led me to this point: packing up my belongings to travel to sub-Saharan Africa for doctoral dissertation research.

So here's to a new Ethiopian year ...and to my being much older and a little wiser in 2006 this time than I was as a hapless 24 year old.

Returning to Addis!

So, in September I hope to return to Addis Ababa after nearly 18 months! This time I plan to stay in Ethiopia's capital for most of the school year (through June/July 2014) conducting research for my doctoral dissertation. This will involve research in archives, libraries and museums, as well as conducting a considerable numbers of interviews with artists and creative professionals.  As many of you know, my dissertation is focused on the production and consumption of art during Ethiopia's "socialist" period, following its revolution in 1974, a topic that I have been working on since completing my MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009. This is a very painful period in Ethiopian history, one that was marked with considerable violence especially in the city of Addis. It was also one of the last gasps of the Cold War on African soil, with the Soviet Union and its allies facing off against the United States, and 'cultural advisors' from across the Communist world flooding the city; Ethiopia became the last "People's Democratic Republic" to be founded before the fall of the Berlin Wall. My dissertation examines the role that artists played in the period, their coerced production of visual propaganda, their subtle modes of resistance and the spaces they negotiated to produce in an environment of oppression.

This blog is entitled "Temari Negn / ተማሪ: ነኝ::" This translates from Amharic to "I am a student," and for the next year I am dedicated to learning as much as I can about this important moment in African history. I intend to use this site as a way of recording the progress of my research and my experiences of life as a research student in Addis. I hope to return to the States with both enough material to write my thesis, and a considerably better grasp of Amharic!

Please do stay in touch and should you be interested in visiting me in beautiful Ethiopia over the next few months, you would be more than welcome!

National Museum of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa