“The Meskel Flower”, a series of photographs is a living archive of Ethiopia’s renewal – Essence

Last week, we celebrated the Ethiopian New Year, a transitional point with nuanced meaning for those celebrating outside the continent. Each September, the brand new season is symbolized by the blooming of the Meskel flower, often called Adey Abeba in Amharic. The flower has turn into a symbol of beauty and survival in equal measure, reborn flawlessly every year within the Ethiopian highlands despite harsh ecological conditions.

In Amharic, there is a level of linguistic interchangeability when referring to the flower, taking over concomitant meanings of youth, rebirth, and expansion. For artists like Ruhama Wolle, one of many global voices documenting the outpouring of an Ethiopian cultural renaissance currently unfolding, the iconography of the flower is not static. Its radiance and revolt reflect the iconography of a recent generation of artists who convey the facility of displacement and return as a source of expansive invention. In a recent series of photographs titled “Meskel Flower: A Love Letter to Ethiopia“Wolle struggles with a self-declaration of home and identity, unconstrained by miles of distance.

Wolle, an editor and artistic producer, has spent much of the past two years in Ethiopia, returning to search out a cultural renaissance amid the country’s political turmoil and genocide. In the country and its global diaspora, young persons are creating works expanding the narrative who they’re and where they arrive from. This fertility is, nonetheless, a paradox that appears in the course of the constant reckoning with years of war, losses and anxiety which left many Ethiopians grappling with the meaning of homeland.

Artists like Wolle, who spent much of their adolescence abroad, are actually crossing dimensions of transnational identity from the United States and elsewhere, using their heritage as a link to burdened pasts and as-yet-unseen futures. Now, as adults, these young persons are reflecting themselves through multimodal means of expression.

“I came back from Ethiopia with a feeling I just can’t put my finger on,” Wolle tells ESSENCE. “I was around people my age, younger and older, who were embracing Ethiopian life as creatives and following this renaissance that was happening.” Witnessing this had a profound effect, raising questions for Wolle about her purpose as a creative within the diaspora. She founded Meskel Flowers as a option to forge deeper meaning for the memory she carries of the country and her interpretation of its current moment of cultural vitality amidst pain. While conceiving the works, she was immediately struck by the interrupted chronology of representation, shocked by how few representations of Ethiopian femininity she could find at hand. This reinforced her urgency to embody this current moment in much the identical way she had spent her profession doing for others in visual form.

Wolle says she desired to create something intentional on her own terms. “That means really thinking about what it looks like to build the next visualization of ourselves.” She landed on a thoughtful but scalable approach. Rather than attempting to seismically change the visual profile of Ethiopian heritage, she desired to present a component of what it means to listen to, placing her chosen medium in the standard Ethiopian living room space.

“The first person I invited here was my photographer Elianel Clinton,” Wolle said. The two had previously worked together on a deeply personal project, and the producer felt comfortable returning to an artist who knew his craft and revered the portrayal of intimate moments between family members. This recent commemorative project was something Wolle desired to share with the imagemaker, who has demonstrated a capability to traverse the size of black culture with a unified visual profile of softness and reflection.

“To recreate that feeling here, it took a team,” Wolle explained. “I had this vision that I always wanted to create an Ethiopian living room and recreate what home looks like for all of us, whether it’s home for someone living in Ethiopia or Sweden or North Carolina.”

The living room stays intact and recognizable to the Habesha community in each of these migrant homes. Wolle and her creative team desired to present the space as a microcosm of cultural transfer, a sacred space that resists the chaos of change. Within it, braided hair, the ritual of the coffee ceremony, intergenerational laughter under fragrant tendrils of incense—these are the markers that keep the culture grounded, and what Wolle desired to reflect in the pictures.

Scenography designed by a producer from Ethiopia Rediet Haddis and created on site by Zachary Adamswas created from the recognizable signatures of the Ethiopian household, achieved through the collaboration of individuals inside and in solidarity with the East African experience. The project’s achievement itself is a statement in pan-African creative practice, drawing talent from individuals acquainted with the ethos of homecoming and black connectivity, to which Wolle sought to appeal, situating herself inside the particular legacy of Ethiopian history.

The living room, arranged with motifs of woven baskets and family photos, invites a sensory reconstruction of cultural practice, introducing the room as a place of stoicism, where memory and culture usually are not only preserved but actively transformed. In these small, intimate spaces, the Ethiopian heritage continues to breathe, uninterrupted by the distances of the diaspora, now presented with a youthful invitation. This return to childhood fascination was a key feature in achieving the tone of “Meskel Flowers.”

“I wanted us to think about play and our inner child,” Wolle said. “With coffee, just having fun with it and braiding each other’s hair – I wanted it to remind us of when we were young and in our homes. I think my younger self needed that release.”

With their inner child throughout the creative team, they’ve managed to filter the sometimes painful yet artistically fertile depths of Ethiopian history—its calls to resistance, its enduring iconography—and reimagine diasporic gifts for future generations to admire and have a good time.

Returning to Ethiopia after years of absence, as Wolle did, means confronting the contradictions of past and present—of what was lost and what is being recreated. Ethiopia has at all times been a source of artistic energy, a source of inspiration that point and distance couldn’t blunt.

But now there is a collective return, a convergence of the old and recent worlds, and artists like Wolle are each documentarians and participants on this unfolding rebirth. “Meskel Flower” embodies this complexity, paying homage to the nuances of reconstruction while honoring Wolle’s declarations. Most importantly, it focuses on who she is as an Ethiopian-American while weaving paths to the living symbols that maintain heritage bridges across oceans.

Authors:

Photographer | Elianel Clinton