Hulet Mot

2015 

Site-specific performance

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Hulet mot explores ideas of absence, ritual, and memory. The phrase “Hulet mot,” which means “two deaths” in Amharic, carries a profound meaning in Ethiopia’s cultural memory. It describes the heavy loss that happens when someone dies, and the body is never found. The final ritual cannot take place. The grave remains unmarked. The farewell is never fully spoken. The family is left in limbo.

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The work shown below was made from a performance in 2015. At the time, Kebreab was studying at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and was trying to understand the journeys of people crossing the Mediterranean by boat. In October 2015, he took a research trip to Lampedusa to see the situation firsthand. At the same time, creating the performance became a way for him to step into the stories he had been reading about and to face them directly on the island. Lampedusa felt heavy with meaning. People call it the Gates to Europe, and the sea around it is filled with memories for far more people than we will ever know.

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In the performance, he set up 368 replica passports from Ethiopia and Eritrea. They relate to a specific event on 3 October 2013, when a boat sank near Lampedusa, and more than three hundred people died. The washing of each passport was a gesture of care and cleansing. It was an attempt to honour those who were lost. The passport, normally a symbol of identity and movement, became material for mourning.

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In his work, Kebreab attempts to create a space where the ritual of goodbye is whether postponed, delayed, or not performed at all, where grief is ended by absence, and where the sea holds more stories than we can name. Through Hulet Mot, Kebreab brings the Ethiopian ritual of death together with the Mediterranean crossings of African refugees. The performance bears witness to lives that vanished and to our shared silence that follows.

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