Lekiso-bet | ለቅሶ ቤት
2016 - 2017
Oslo, Norway
This work emerges from a moment of collective rupture: On April 19, 2015, a deeply disturbing propaganda video titled Until There Came to Them Clear Evidence was released by ISIS, sending shockwaves through social media. Produced by al-Furqan, the Islamic State’s media wing, the footage documented the execution of two groups of Ethiopian migrants in Libya. Sixteen men, dressed in black, were shot in the Fezzan desert, while twelve others, clad in orange, were beheaded on the Mediterranean shores of Barqa. Branded in the video as “Worshipers of the cross belonging to the hostile Ethiopian Church,” these individuals were migrants searching for safety, dignity, and a better life. Their dreams ended in the desert and by the sea, and the world moved on. But in Ethiopia, the grief carried differently.
Lekiso-bet, is an Ethiopian cultural framework meaning “house of lamentation.” Traditionally, Lekiso-bet is a communal space of mourning, where grief is performed, witnessed, and held collectively. Drawing from this tradition, the work explores how memory, displacement, and public space intersect in conditions of precarity. The tent house (Lekiso-bet)—a recurring architectural and conceptual motif—serves as both a physical and symbolic structure: impermanent yet grounded, vulnerable yet generative. It functions as a mobile site of remembrance, storytelling, and social gathering, echoing indigenous informal social systems such as Idir, which foster solidarity through shared ritual and mutual care.
Developed as part of my master's research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the work centers on a symbolic tent house—a structure that becomes both a shelter and a site of storytelling. It draws parallels between the perilous journeys of East African refugees and the role of participatory art. It is a gesture toward a different kind of monument within a contemporary art context. The work does not aim to monumentalize tragedy, but to hold space—for those lost, for those left behind, and for those still in motion.
