Adwa

Short Abstract: Adwa is an oral museum interpretation developed as an output of the practice-based doctoral thesis L’Orecchio Teso, L’Occhio Sordo. Created through research with the photographic collection of the former Colonial Museum of Rome, the work responds to a colonial photograph of an unnamed Eritrean girl while deliberately withholding the image from the listener. Through storytelling, listening, autoethnography, and somatic engagement, Adwa explores how museum interpretation can address the violence and objectification embedded in colonial photographic archives without recirculating their images.

The work enacts a curatorial methodology developed through the doctoral research and described as epistemic creolization: bringing heterogeneous ways of knowing into relation without reducing them to a single epistemic framework. Grounded in care, epistemic justice, and reparation, Adwa asks how museum interpretation might engage with colonial photographs without simply recirculating their images or reproducing the objectifying forms of knowledge through which they have historically been made visible and knowable.

Longer abstract: Adwa is an oral museum interpretation developed as an output of the practice-based doctoral thesis L’Orecchio Teso, L’Occhio Sordo. Created in 2022 through research with the photographic collection of the former Colonial Museum of Rome (IsIAO collection), the work emerged from an encounter with a colonial photograph of an unnamed Eritrean girl, identified in the archive only through the racializing label “Baria Girl.”

Rather than reproducing the photograph, the Adwa piece deliberately asks the audience to encounter the work through listening. The piece reflects on the colonial and patriarchal conditions through which the photograph was produced, circulated, classified, and subsequently encountered in the archive, while questioning the authority traditionally accorded to visual observation in the interpretation of colonial photographic collections. The provisional act of naming the girl “Adwa” becomes a relational gesture that responds to archival erasure while acknowledging the impossibility of recovering or speaking for her historical subjectivity.

Combining historical and art-historical research with autoethnographic reflection, storytelling, listening, African oral epistemologies, and somatic engagement, Adwa explores alternative ways of producing and communicating knowledge about colonial photographic heritage. The listener is invited to attend not only to the historical violence embedded in the photograph but also to their own embodied responses to histories of racialization, objectification, and colonialism.

The work enacts a curatorial methodology developed through the doctoral research and described as epistemic creolization: bringing heterogeneous ways of knowing into relation without reducing them to a single epistemic framework. Grounded in care, epistemic justice, and reparation, Adwa asks how museum interpretation might engage with colonial photographs without simply recirculating their images or reproducing the objectifying forms of knowledge through which they have historically been made visible and knowable.