Stories from Ethiopia, following its makers, places, materials, and ideas through contemporary culture, everyday life, and the futures people are building.
At Abrehot Library in Addis Ababa, wisdom is written into the architecture. Seven monumental columns carry the idea across eighteen languages, while glass, concrete, people and reflections make the building readable before anyone steps inside.
Traveling light has little to do with owning less. It begins with a more uncomfortable question: how much of what we carry is necessary, and how much is simply our fear of being unprepared?
inAfrica began as a network connecting Italians working across African countries. One connection brought Ayzoh! and AFAR together and became a story about business, trust, and the distance between entering a market and building a relationship.
In Addis Ababa, Sabahar works with spinners, dyers and weavers whose knowledge belongs to one of Ethiopia’s oldest material traditions. Keeping that knowledge alive, however, requires more than preservation: it requires change.
This is the second story in an "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian culture through everyday practices and knowledge. At Ensira Pottery Center in Addis Ababa, women shape the jebena amid children, kilns, fragile pots, and shared life.
Photographer and linguist Giulia Zhang studies the Burji language in southern Ethiopia. Her work moves between images and words, asking a larger question: what do we lose when we stop listening to the many ways people name the world?
This is the first story in a new "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian culture through the practices, materials, places, and forms of knowledge that shape everyday life. We begin with food: with teff, and with the work that comes before injera.
At Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, architecture, art, education, cultivation, and daily life belong to the same living system. AFAR’s relationship with the museum began in friendship and has grown through years of shared work, visits, and images.
AFAR uses vegetable-tanned zebu leather and horn recovered from existing Ethiopian farming and food systems. “By-product” is not a claim of innocence. It describes where the material begins, and the responsibility that follows.