Maaza Mengiste: Of Interest to the General Public
Objects talk back
About a Coronation Cloak from Ethiopia
Inspired by the history of the 1868 Napier expedition and the burning of the palace fortress at Magdala, Of Interest to the General Public is a narration by the Ethiopian writer and photographer Maaza Mengiste. She combines photographs and text to re-imagine the journey of the stunning and elaborately made royal cloak from Ethiopia – out of battle, through fire, over mountains to cross the waters into Berlin, Germany.
The œuvre of Maaza Mengiste, who currently lives in New York, is composed from voices and stories that have been excluded, from gaps that seem inexplicable, from images, objects and places that pulse with pasts unresolved.
Series Objects talk back published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss.
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. Her debut novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze was named by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books. Her novel The Shadow King was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Mengiste is the founder of Project3541, a collective memory project about the Italian Ethiopian War of 1935–1941 that seeks to move beyond the static nature of an archive.
