Àforítì: Reflections on resilience: Maintaining the vision
What does it mean to maintain a vision? That middle passage of sorts where you’re so invested in a vision that returning to what you left does not resonate at all yet navigating challenges to keep the momentum going can also seem tricky and overwhelming at times. How do you keep staying in communication with truth and keep at it? I explored this in conversation with Adiam Yemane, an Ethiopian Eritrean visual artist and storyteller.
How long have you been on this journey of visual storytelling?
Around 8 years, it wasn’t something that I was naturally gifted with even though I was drawn to it from an early age. I have always been able to visually understand things, but it took me a long time to understand my visual language and how to express myself in that way. It has become much clearer and more vivid for me in the last three years.
What helped you get clear and become more confident and comfortable expressing yourself through photography?
Spending more time on it. In the beginning I didn’t have this privilege because I was balancing 3-4 jobs whilst doing photography. In the last three years I have been able to go full-time and spend more time practising which has helped in building my confidence using this medium.
How has your vision for your work changed since you started?
It’s always changing, and I hope that it will always keep changing. In the last three years I’ve been drawn to explore more personal stories, like my refugee experience. Doing this I feel closer to what I’m supposed to be saying with the medium. It’s a sensitive topic and it still feels like there are ups and downs, but I feel like I have a more solid and clear goal to keep things as authentic as possible and let the work do its thing.
What inspired you to start communicating about personal stuff through your work?
As an artist, whatever I create always comes from me, so its quite personal anyway. You don’t realise that until you start doing things with others and you realise that you are doing things outside of your interest. For someone’s artistry to be authentic is has to come from within. When you do something from a personal perspective its something that has never been done before so it’ll have a uniqueness to it. People will feel it, it will be more than what they see or touch.
How do you manage the process of managing emotions that come up in the process of touching on sensitive topics through your work?
At the beginning it used to be quite difficult. I would stop doing something or start procrastinating and somehow drift away from the work. From doing that a few times I realised that I was afraid of being exposed. I found the problem, so the solution was to continue. In doing this I realised that it became a way for me to express myself and heal. How I manage the fear of being exposed is I tell myself that I don’t need to always share what I create, that its ok to create for the sake of therapy. I’ve also found that once I’ve created the thing that I was too afraid to share, most of the time after creating it I feel comfortable sharing it with people just by going through the process.
In one of your blog posts you talk about “how cultures and beliefs of our surroundings can really hold us down and stop us from fully being and expressing our selves” – Can you talk about how you stay true to Adiyam as you navigate through attempts to determine your identity?
I’ve lived in a few different spaces of different cultures and recently I’ve realised that I don’t need to stick to one piece of identity, I think sticking to one is how we end up losing parts of ourselves. As we grow and travel, we tend to pick up other cultures. I’m a combination of all the places that I’ve visited. Doing personal work is also important, sometimes we can concentrate on the external parts of ourselves that we can disconnect from our roots. I like to find time to spend time on my own to explore what it is that I’m feeling or want to say.
From your work I can see you’ve moved around and travelled in recent years can you talk through that process of listening to your intuition and letting it guide you to different spaces?
It’s something that comes naturally for me. I moved countries from an early age and have always felt that sense of being on the move. Whenever I get an urge to move, I tend to listen to it because whenever I don’t, which I have in the past for different reasons, I’m not it the best place. When I spend time grounding myself, I can listen to what my body is telling me about spaces where I can express myself. There are some spaces that I can feel quite stagnant and that indicates to me that I’m not listening. Being able to tune in is important to me.
In your project ‘She is not only her’, one of your images is titled ‘They will never listen when she talks unless she speaks’ - What do you see as the difference between talking and speaking?
That whole project came from this feeling I kept getting from coming with age, I’m about to turn 29 and I keep hearing about what women should be doing at this age. I had a conversation with someone who told me that I’ve wasted 10 years and only have another 10 before I can have kids. To give an example of the difference between talking and speaking, during this conversation it felt like I had to speak-up to get my point across. We tend to have to raise our voice or show some sort of passion or anger, especially as black women, that’s what inspired the title. When I speak to family back home in Eritrea, like my grandmother, in every conversation I’m asked about when I’m going to have children. These kinds of interactions have inspired me to reflect on womanhood through this project, we’re not just ‘her’, she can be who she wants to be.
What other topics are you feeling inspired to explore through your work?
I’m going to continue working on my refugee project. It’s a serious side of me and I’d like to create something that expresses other sides of me. I’ve been thinking about working with young women, I see that there is a huge gap in terms of information about sexuality. I struggled quite a lot as a teenager in terms of understanding who I am in terms of my sexuality. There’s a lot that can be done in terms of sexual health as well as our relationship to sex.
Final question, what does resilience mean to you?
Being able to bounce back, quick enough. I was resilient way before I even knew resilience due to circumstances that I’ve been through in life. Its something that comes naturally to me, and I feel blessed to be resilient. I know I have to keep working and keep exercising it as it helps me stay true to me.
Connect with Adiam