Tsedaye Makonnen and Jermay Michael Gabriel | Waves of Ash

This performance links Tsedaye Makonnen’s and Jermay Michael Gabriel’s artistic practices, migration, the archive of memory, and the deviation of Western epistemology. Their work takes the form of an installation composed of burned wood and textiles. Engaged in the collection of objects such as pieces of wood found in the lagoon and presented in the form of a conical structure, the act of burning, understood as both destruction and transformation, raises a fundamental question for Western epistemology: to what extent are we willing to accept history as it is transmitted to us, without exercising a critical gaze? Tsedaye’s blue textiles bring the discourse of the lagoon/sea back to the center as a liminal space of passage and stratified memory: a site where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic symbolically converge, evoking the history of Black, African, and Afro-descendant peoples, marked by migration, forced crossings, and suppressed narratives. The work ultimately converges on a single question: should history be destroyed or preserved? Or rather, should it be approached from a critical perspective, deconstructed, and rewritten from its margins?