Elias Sime :: eye of the needle, eye of the heart

Made a quick visit to Santa Monica Museum of Art yesterday to visit a friend who works there and was taken aback by their wonderful exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. It’s presented like an installation, with stuffed and decorated goat skins, and thrones carved from wood and animal horns arranged around the floor of the room, which they opened up to one big room with the high warehouse ceiling opened up.

Elias Sime at SMMA, image from http://micheleguieu.blogspot.com/

I was reminded of Ethiopia, probably because of the colors and materials. The brown and earthy tenor of the whole room, highlighted with bright colors of plastic and threads within the larger pieces are the colors of Ethiopia, where mud and rocks prevail. The goat skins and thrones, along with mud and straw sculptures of monkeys in one corner, are made from the materials traditionally ised forbuilding traditional tukuls ( before eucalyptus was introduced in the 19th century!). A video in the back room, narrated by an enthusiastic Peter Sellars, gives a great view of the artist’s life within his community in Addis.

Although the goat skins and thrones dominate the room (I love the wooden carved feet emerging from some of the thrones!), the stitched canvas paintings hung on the walls are surreal and impressive in their craftsmanship. The imagery is pure modernism–heroic and masculine, but every line is stitched into the canvas (by hand? I think so.). You get close and you can feel the tenacity required to manually create the broad strokes of color one 1/4-inch stitch at a time.

My favorite part of the installation is video that you can control, taking you through the streets of Addis. They simply attached a camera to a car and drove around. It really gives a sense of this city, which my dad calls an “overgrown village.”

Check out this blog, which has loads of great photos, including Peter Sellars’ gigantic face from one of the the videos.

See some of my own photos from Ethiopia, and read about my travels there by choosing the “Ethiopia” tag on this blog, or visit my Flickr page.

On Publishing Travel Photos and Stories for Posterity

I returned from my trip to Ethiopia on June 15. Six weeks later I have shared the photos and stories with many people and in many formats! I decided to take the time to be really organized and comb carefully through all of my photos (1,000+) to choose the best, and to place them in order and caption them to re-tell the story of my trip, my thoughts, experiences, and recollections. (See the highlights of my Ethiopia trip here.) After going on a number of trips over the past 3 years, I have learned that if I don’t do this right away, it just doesn’t happen. And then all my memories slowly slip away. I look at the photos 3 years later and wonder what I was thinking when I took them. So this time, I had a really strong sense of “it’s now or never” driving me to organize, annotate, and share. And having the ability to post everything online and share with friends across the globe was a great motivator too. There’s a real sense here of not just creating a record of my traveling experiences for me and my friends, but of contributing to a larger education (in the West) about the country and history of Ethiopia, as well as about the joy of travel.

This trip was also unusual because of my family connection to the country. Soon after I returned back to L.A., I gave a pecha kucha slideshow (20 slides, 20 seconds each) presentation about my trip and my dad’s life living there, in which I reconstructed some of his photos from the early 60s. That, in turn, inspired me to re-create the slideshow on Flickr. And then from there, I decided to create a book, which I published myself on Lulu.com, based on the pecha kucha: Connecting to History in Ethiopia, A Travel Reconstruction.

Retracing My Dad’s Steps in Ethiopia

On my recent trip to Ethiopia I took along with me some copies of the photos my dad took while he lived there in 1962-64. Dad lived in Addis and among his photographs were some images of the neighborhood he lived in. I got him to show me on a map before hand, and in Addis I set off on a quest to find the same locations and document them again. It’s really amazing how little things have changed there. The trees are bigger, and some short walls have been made taller, but that’s about it.

Below, left, is an image from 1964 of the walkway/alley leading to the house my dad lived in with his roommate, Charlie, seen in the photo. Access to the house (the one with the chimney) and its yard was through the gate behind Charlie. On the right, I am standing in front of the same gate in 2008 (less than 2 weeks ago). The same gate is there–they just added wood to the top section and painted it green.

Below are two images of the street leading up to this alleyway, at the top of the “70 steps”. The top image is from ca. 1964 (Dad’s camera had a much nicer lens on it than my little Cannon digital Elph), the bottom one from today. You can see the same stone wall to the right (extended upwards today), and even the same green shack on the right of the telephone pole (also the same!).

“History” in Ethiopia

One thing that is very clear to me as I travel in Ethiopia is that the people here have a very strong sense of being a part of ‘history’. And it’s a long, long history. From pre-biblical times, their kings ruled the entire area of Sudan, Yemen, parts of Somalia and present day Ethiopia and Eritrea. They also claim to be one of the first Christianized cultures and have a Holy Land pedigree, as their first king, Menelik I was the son of King Solomon; his mother the Queen of Sheba. Menelik is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Axum from Israel, (along with thousands of Jews, whose mixed decendents are now called the fallasha), which still rests in a secret chapel in Axum to this day, and is seen only by one monk, chosen to guard it with his life.

The land is full of reminders of thousands of years of powerful kingdoms — ruins litter the land in the far north, from the Axumite stele and palaces in the north from the pre-Christian era, to the rock-hewn churches in Tigrai and around Lalibela from the 6th through the 13th (?) centuries, and the castles built by Fasilides in the 17th century. More recently, they are the only African nation to have resisted European colonization (despite a brief occupation by Italy, which is still evident in some of the food, architecture, and pasta on most menus that serve foreign (farengi) food). I get the sense that during the rule of the last king, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia saw many improvements and began to be modernized. Much of the modern architecture we’ve seen in cities was clearly built in the 60s and early 70s. One gets the sense that after Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and a Communist government called “the Derg’ took over (until 1991), things went downhill fast and are not really recovering very well.

That these histories are Ethiopia’s is not in dispute. But the specifics of the histories–how they play out over time and the details of why and how, are not clear at all. We have been hearing contradictory stories continually. The Ethiopian version of the history sometimes is doubted by European scholars. When I listen to Ethiopians tell their story, it is clear that they have a very strong faith about and certainty about their version, which has been passed down from generation to generation, and is often tinged with Christian prophecy. The most famous of these is the story of the Queen of Sheba and the ark of the covenant. Is the real ark in Axum? Did the Axumite kings bring Christianity to the horn of Africa peacefully, willingly abandoning their pagan beliefs? In Axum, we saw so many ruins built by unquestionably powerful cultures. But many of  the sites are un-excavated, or only partially investigated. Scholars have been slow to spend time here to explore the history of this land, which I think must have rivaled that of the greatest cultures of Europe and the Middle East. I suppose there will be some more unfolding of the story in the future….

Walking on Rocks in Ethiopia

We just left Lalibela, home of sacred monolithic rock-hewn churches, which were pretty stunning. While we were in the area we went on a trek through the neighborung villages of Meket, which are in the highlands south of Lalibella. We walked and walked for 3 days, mostly on rocks! We walked along cliff edges, overlooking the lowland valley below us. Villages were perched on the sides of the sloping hills we looked down on. we’d hear people communicating from village to village by shouting up the hills, across the valleys, down the gulches. Aside from this and the occasional sound of a generator for a stone mill, we heard nothing else of humans. We also walked across the fields, which are being planted now, in waiting for the rains, which have basically already started. The fields have rocks all over. It’s amazing that things grow there. Our guide said they have no choice. They need to grow crops wherever they can. We walked on the rocks (my ankles are kind of sore) and we stayed in treaditional tukuls on the cliffs. It was pretty amazing. Photos to come…

Ethiopia–adventures on arrival

I just arrived in Adis Abiba, Ethiopia about 36 hours ago. I am staying at a very non-touristy place with a friend of mine who is involved in a training workwhop for NGOs. So I am having a very un-typical introduction to the country since I am in an enclave with internet access, constant electricity (though not constant water – it gets turned on 3x a day for 2 hours), a cafeteria, and a security force. Indeed, this may be my only blog post from Ethiopia – I have heard there is little internet service elsewhere, and where there is an internet cafe, it’s very expensive and the connections are very slow. And given my cash situation, I think I may just forego the cost. You see, I came to Ethiopia with my money in a miture of $USD in cash and traveler’s checks; mostly traveler’s checks. (Ethiopia doesn’t have any international ATMs, apparently, though it seems this may be changing. There is supposed to be one in the Sheraton Hotel here in Addis, and I saw some postings online about a few appearing here and there in random bank branches of this one bank.) So, I arrive in the airport, and expect to cash in some traveler’s checks. No. Cash only. This is not what I read, so I was confused, and changed $50 cash. Then yesterday my friend tried to change her checks too and the bank here told her no, that can’t change them. Furthermore, no banks in Ethiopia are accepting them right now! We can’t get a straight answer about why this is the case. So…I have less than half the cash available for exchange that I anticipated needing for my trip! We’re going to the Sheraton today to see if we can use their ATM, or if they will cash traveler’s checks. Fingers crossed.

Last night we went out to dinner at a traditional restaurant, with music, and singing and dancing. It was really good, except that afterwards we discovered that one of the dishes was raw beef! I had been warned about this dish, kifto special, and was told not to eat it. So we spent a good amount of time trying to figure out if we had eaten it. Basially, it doesn’t look raw in the way I’d expected it to – it doesn’t look like sushi, for example; it looks like ground beef. I took a few photos, but it was very dark and even my flash didn’t really capture the atmosphere. (The connection is so slow here anyway that it takes 5 minutes to upload one photo. So I posted a few to my flickr.) I tried to get photos of the dancers but they were moving so fast they are a bit of a blur, which actualy does get across some of the atmosphere. The object of the dances we saw seemed to be to make your shoulders and arms appear as if they are not connected to your body. The dancers would isolate their trunk while shuddering and flicking their shoulders, arms, and even legs. Pretty impressive.