Unseen

The Notes is the first chapter in the remake of 'Abyssininan Expedition'

Unseen is a project that works with finding ways in which archive material can be approached, visualized, analyzed in order to render something visible that otherwise would remain unnoticed.

Unseen takes the ethnographic film Abyssinian Expedition as the source material. It is a moving pictures made in 1926 by a New York independent filmmaker Charles Suydam Cutting during an expedition organized by the Chicago Field Museum together with the Chicago Daily News to Abyssinia as response to the increasing international interest in the African region that resisted Western colonial power.

Two people are involved in the project, Lisa Brooks and myself. Brooks is the only one of us who has seen the film. She has seen the images of the film.
She has taken hand written notes as schematic, factual as possible while watching the film. The context of the film is unknown to her.
I have researched the context of the film. I haven't seen the images of the film. I haven't seen the film.

The Notes consist on the scans of the notes made by Lisa Brooks while she watched the ethnographic film 'Abyssinian Expedition' at the Chicago Field Museum. This film only exists at the Chicago Field Museum and, in a different editing version, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Both copies were edited by the filmmaker himself.

These scans were presented printed on paper in the group show 'Traveling Communique'* at the Museum of Yugoslav History,
in the frame of the Master in Art Praxis DAI (Dutch Art Institute)**

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*'Travelling Communique' project is informed by the idea that the collective statement articulated as a call for a new kind of internationalism by the 25 delegates of the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, September 1961, remains unanswered. Travelling Communiqué does not aspire to celebrate the histories and geographies of the Cold War and the NAM. Instead, it enquires into the possibilities of ‘prolonging’ the formation of the NAM into the social conditions of the present. The NAM can be understood as a third space of emancipation that sought to unsettle the bipolar world order through a wide variety of anti-colonial thinking. The Travelling Communiqué is an attempt to understand the process of becoming a political subject, initiated by those without names whose voices exist despite the efforts to silence them.

'Travelling Communique' is curated by Armin Linke (Italy/Germany), Doreen Mende (Germany) and Milica Tomić (born in former Yugoslavia) in permanent discussion with Yero Adugna Eticha (Ethiopia), Kader Attia (Algeria/France), and Fabian Bechtle (Germany).

UNSEEN. Abyssininan Expedition Remake

HD Video/ B&W/ No Sound
(Work in progress)
(Video excerpt)

UNFOLD Editorial group:

Jan Adriaans, Daniel Alemayehu, Helen Zeru Araya, Hanan Benammar, Katia Barret, Anna Dasovic, Coco Duivenvoorde, Yero Adugna Eticha, Abiyi Ford, Tamrat Gezahegne, Elisabeth W. Giorgis, Fasil Giorghis, Aziza Harmel, Monique Hendriksen, Mulgeta Kassa, Mihret Kebede, Tesfahun Kibru, Silvia Ulloa, Marianna Maruyama, Beede M. Mekonnen, Yafet Mekonnen, Doreen Mende (Editor in Charge), Leykun Nahusenay, O'Tam Pulto (Sinkneh Eshetu), Celia Eslamieh Shomal, Jacq van der Spek, Aarti Sunder, Laila Torres Mendieta, Larraitz Torres.

Publisher: Travelling Communique
Print: Berta Printing, Addis Ababa

The first issue is funded by the Dutch Art Institue (DAI)

This project was initiated as part of a participatory segment of the long-term and independent project Travelling Communique with the master program at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). During this study period I made a field-trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March 2014 together with a group of artist from The Netherlands. During this trip we made a collective publication —UNFOLD— together with students, architects, historians and artists from the Nets Art Village in Addis Ababa, the Ale Art School of Addis Ababa University, and the Dutch Art Institute (DAI).