24 ORE
Aida, the desire for the future
By Laura Leonelli
November 06, 2016
If the queen of Sheba, the legendary founder of Ethiopia, were looking for an heir worthy of her fame, a woman capable of representing today the tensions of a nerve-center country in the balance of Africa and Europe itself, she should do nothing else. than reaching Addis Ababa, approaching the Sidist Kilo neighborhood, crossing Yekatit 12 square, dedicated to the victims of the reprisal for the attack on General Graziani during the fascist occupation, then passing in front of the University and finally climbing the stairs of the International Leadership Building Institute. And here, enjoying one of the nine daily cups of coffee provided by tradition and religiously divided into three tastings, a tribute to the Trinity, he would meet Aida Muluneh, 42, an extraordinary photographer, prize for theRencontres africaines de la photographie from Bamako and founder of one of the most vital organizations on the Ethiopian art scene, the Desta, Developing and Educating Society Through Art, where awakens in the Amharic language means "happiness". And it all starts from here.
An artist like Aida, with that princess name that carries within her the tragic memory of her country, began to be happy when she managed to tell another story, different from the European chronicles, because it is aimed at the future. A story, indeed many stories that will animate the Addis Foto Fest (www.adonzotofest.com) from 15 to 20 December, conceived six years ago by Muluneh herself and today a reference exhibition. Surprisingly, one of the most intimate tales of the destiny of the new generations was written together with a leading Italian coffee company, Bristot of Belluno, which in Ethiopia buys its best Arabica - selected by the Nkg organization (www.hrnstiftung.org ), attentive to the social and economic development of communities of coffee growers - and that in Ethiopia, in a logic of restitution, wanted to support the projectTales on(www.taleson.org), created with great sensitivity by Marco Milan, artistic director and designer. A project that "on the 250th anniversary of the last number of" Il Caffè "by Pietro and Alessandro Verri, published in 1766, renews the vital combination of a drink, a meeting place and those who have a modern and democratic vision of society ”, Explains the curator. The new "enlighteners" of the Horn of Africa? They are five young Ethiopian photographers, Haymanot Honelegn Assefa, Hilina Mekonen Tesfaw, Luna Solomon, Maheder Haileselassie Tadese and Netsanet Fekadu, chosen by Marco Milan and Aida Muluneh with a double look that brings distances closer. And "the distance" between cultures, generations, man and woman, city and countryside is the theme of the five portfolios of thirty images each, and five video interviews that will be exhibited at the festival and in parallel in Venice,
Alongside "happiness", not surprisingly, the word that marks the life of Aida Muluneh and makes her exemplary is "distance". Distance as separation and emancipation. "My grandmother, who at fourteen, married a child, flees her village ten hours' walk from Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia, and alone reaches the capital, gave me the example," recalls Aida. Forty years later, in 1979, during the Mengistu dictatorship, another flight to Yemen. "This time I was next to my grandmother, and together we reached my mother who had been arrested, tortured and then miraculously released". Another passage to Cyprus, then Canada with refugee status, and finally mother, daughter and granddaughter reach Washington, where Aida studies cinema and joins the Washington Post as a photojournalist.
In 2007 Aida is in Ethiopia, a long reportage, "and I finally found my roots, I left America, a safe place, a family and I went back to my real home". Another three years of work and the Ethiopia volume comes out . Past / Forward .
“I needed an image of mine, ours , different from that of Western photographers, who for a hundred years had looked at Africa as a wild, naked and desperate country. On the other hand, I was interested in the future, forward, forward ». Strange to say, but the inspiration to create an original language comes from the history of Italian literature, Dante. In 2014 Simon Njami, Cameroonian writer, art critic and curator of the Rencontres of Bamako, invited Aida Muluneh to create a work on the Divine Comedy, The Divine Comedy. Heaven, Purgatory and Hell revisited by Contemporary African Artists . Aida chooses the XX Canto dell ' Inferno, that of fortune-tellers, his head thrown back and tears running down his back, "because the gravest fault is not knowing how to read the changes and force a country to live in the past". A past that also believes in ethnic purity, "and my story would be enough, I who boast in my family of Tigrinya, Oromo and Amhara origins, I who am an Orthodox Christian with a Muslim great-grandfather, to understand how cruel and distant this attitude is. reality".
To look forward, "to be the archive of the next fifty years", Aida has created Desta for Africa, a study center for the development of society through art and photography, where photography "is not the single image but a communication system ". In 2010 the festival was born. In 2012 a son. One more effort and one day a publishing house will be born. For the name Aida she thought of a phrase from her grandmother: «The world is nine, because it cannot be ten, because it cannot be complete». Distance from perfection is the most human and universal. Yet, one story after another, it is not certain that Aida, a soprano by nature, is unable to cancel the greatest distance, the one that separates us from our dreams.