The Sacred Forests of Ethiopia
An art installation commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial consisting of moving image and film, augmented reality visualisations, an ambient sound piece and a built installation. By Ibiye Camp, David Killingsworth & Emmy Bacharach, assisted by Rhiarna Dhaliwal
The thousands of sacred church forests in the Amahara state in Ethiopia are enclaves of religious practices and ecological intensity, in the context of the rising pressure from intensive farming and deforestation.
The work explores the church forests as a system of resistance. The models show the landscape scanned and divided into sections that mimic a Voroni tessellation.
Moving images of the landscapes and its rituals, and aerial imagery of the church forests, serve to explore the future of this peculiar ecology. The films and augmented-reality visualisations by Ibiye Camp, David Killingsworth and Rhiarna Dhaliwal are used to speculate on alternative relations between humans and nature. Ambient field recordings manipulated by Emmy Bacharach accompany the installation.
The physical elements of the installation emphasise the incompleteness of the sacred landscape, whereas its digital parts are used to speculate on the future expansion of the forests.
Commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial
