Sosena Solomon
Documentary Filmmaker, Visual Artist, Professor, Cultural Preservationist
African Cultural Landmarks
From The Met press release:
"A series of new films inspired by Africa’s diverse cultural landmarks, filmed and directed by award-winning Ethiopian-American social documentary and multimedia visual artist Sosena Solomon and created in collaboration with World Monuments Fund (WMF), will be featured throughout The Met’s Arts of Africa galleries in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which will reopen on May 31; the content will also be featured online..."
ITIFWORQ / Double Gold
ITIFWORQ/DOUBLE GOLD, 2017/2018 is history as it is retold and remembered. Through my camera, I prompt remembrance and autobiography from our conversations on my grandmother’s bed. I recreate this intimacy through immersion in a cornered two channel
video projection where the viewer sits in the center listening through headphones with Ethiopian cultural relics astride. The looping dual channel projection allows deeper engagement with the storytelling process, as my grandmother narrates on the left screen, the traditional coffee ceremony is shown on the right. Her account advances as the coffee ceremony does, the process itself being a cultural opener for gathering and sharing. It is a meditation on memory, resilience, family history and divine feminine energy.
Lost in a Dream
LOST IN A DREAM is a deeply personal, poetic tribute to my twin sister who passed away prematurely, and in a larger sense speaks to the mending of separations. The film conveys a cathartic experience of my process of reflection in confronting my fears and shifting the internal dialogue I have with myself. On a universal level, this piece is a reminder that we can bridge impossible distances, whether we have literally lost someone, ourselves, or seeking to find common ground. We are all in this together. This video is part of a autobiographical installation work.
Eckhaus Latta
Mizan
INSTALLATIONS
Merkato
In MERKATO visitors see, feel, hear and taste through the constructed marketplace. The immersive dirt floor environment features a performance from a recycling vendor, coffee ceremony, breadsharing, incense, recorded soundscapes, visual projections, photos andsculptural installations. In Callowhill, the neighborhood where I lived for 7 years, the themes of displacement, transition and change also emerge. Philadelphia’s first and oldest woman street vendor participated, giving powerful testimony of her experience and the connections she felt to Merkato vendors. The Ethiopian Community Center in West Philadelphia is the longest running Ethiopian organization nationally. Installing here called upon personal memories, s tories and associations of Merkato to be shared in a culturally resonant spaceamplified by the coffee and incense ceremony. At the Wolf Humanities Forum (IHP), the audience of academics, African cinephiles and array of international students, connected across culture when visiting the installation and screening. The Q&A brought to lightcommonalities of frenetic and rich market spaces globally. Plastic water barrels, recycled containers, crates, tarps and chicken wire pictured here provide visual texture over the dimensions of sound and smell. I chose to reproduce the recycling section of Merkato, being the most vulnerable to permanent displacement from redevelopment. Wurro’sportraits, among others, are featured in the installation. Relationship and trust building is a core tenant of my ethnographic lens, as I seek to represent my own communities and other culturally marginalized groups with deep respect, thoughtfulness and sensitivity.
ITIFWORQ / Double Gold
I crafted this space to be textured and multi-sensory for the viewer to sit in the center and feel immersed in a slice of my grandmother’s home, her words guiding you while the material components enhance this sense of familiarity. ITIFWORQ/DOUBLE GOLD features important heirlooms including family portraits, items for the coffee ceremony and my grandmother’s cape, which as an item of clothing connotes honor and respect as it is reserved for women who are married or war heroes. Two channel cornered video and single source headphone audio makes this encounter deliberately isolating and deeply personal. My father pictured below reflects the larger intentions with my work, by activating
remembrance and showing African stories rarely seen in this form. I also activated this work at Konsthall C Gallery in Sweden in 2018 where it was the opening exhibition of CinemAfrica Film Festival’s 20th Anniversary and received the jury award for Best Short Film.
Amy
AMY, 2019 is a recognition of the life and passion of Amy Kidoho, a hair artist and braider based in North Carolina though originally from Senegal. As a multimedia installation piece, this first person narrative is told amidst the “glass forest” I create. This site is an intimate, highly reflective and all encompassing space comprised of scaffolded broken mirrors, golden glass fragments, gilded metals with glimmering yellow gold painted walls and ceilings. The 5 minute docu-memoir is projected on tarnished mirror, which is a reference both to the fully reflective walls of African hair salons and the distortion of reality through the camera and global gaze. While Amy is a survivor of human trafficking, the regimes of representation surrounding victimhood, migration and Africa are severely dehumanizing and reductive. The fragmented and spotted glass alludes to the multiple realities we inhabit, both through imposition and self-construction. I also braided and placed hair in the glass cases to evoke the material conditions of fashion-objects and their implications in terms of trade, circulation and industry. While hair is mass produced and imported, it has no inherent value. Amy’s working of the hair, her attention to detail and the highly personal act of
braiding someone’s hair as a form of their self-fashioning, also speak to the dimensions of gender, labor and affect in this work.