Stories from Ethiopia, following its makers, places, materials, and ideas through contemporary culture, everyday life, and the futures people are building.
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?
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 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.
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.
AFAR took its name from a region of salt, heat, distance, and human endurance. Years later, the name still asks a question: what does it mean to carry a place with you?
Ayzoh! works with Awra Amba to carry its ideas beyond the Ethiopian highlands through photography, publishing, and long-term relationships. AFAR is among the principal partners supporting this work and helping the community’s voice reach readers around the world.
36 portrait posters featuring the people who make AFAR bags in Addis Ababa. Inspired by a question raised by Fashion Revolution, the project brings the viewer inside the workshop: who stands behind the objects we use every day?
