In The Ethiopian Parochet, Ido Michaeli pursues his concern with symbols as a means of defining identity. The type of ritual cloth featured in this work is traditionally hung on the front of the ark where the synagogue’s Torah scrolls are kept. This particular cloth features images created in collaboration with Almaz, a community embroidery project designed to preserve Ethiopian culture in Israel. The images embroidered on the cloth depict the encounter between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The cloth is exhibited alongside a video projection in which the women who embroidered it tell the story of this legendary encounter. This version of the story is taken from the Ethiopian national epic Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), which centers on the stories of the Ark of the Covenant and of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Jerusalem. This epic describes how the Ark of the Covenant was taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, and how the retinue of Menelik, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought it to an Orthodox church in Ethiopia. Menelik, who was anointed as king, became the first Ethiopian emperor, and the founder of the Solomonic dynasty.
Michaeli’s project was inspired in part by the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement and the early 20th-century modernist Bauhaus movement, which sought, in different ways, to erase the boundaries between art and craft. Such an attempt was first made in a local context by Boris Schatz, who founded the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem in 1906. The work method at Bezalel, which centered on the creation of hand-crafted Judaica objects, involved a distinction between the design of the objects, which was undertaken by the school’s European teachers, and between their manual crafting by immigrant craftsmen from Middle-Eastern countries. The artifacts produced at Bezalel were thus a fusion of European ideology and design and Middle-Eastern traditions of craftsmanship.
The Judaica artifacts produced at Bezalel were intended to serve as new Hebrew symbols for the Jewish people, and to contribute to the consolidation of a national identity. By contrast, The Ethiopian Parochet embodies a more complex, bifurcated understanding of identity: a collaboration between an Israeli artist and Ethiopian craftswomen serves to present a national Ethiopian ethos based on the biblical story of the Kingdom of Judea.
The Ethiopian Parochet is displayed in this exhibition in the manner in which ritual objects or souvenirs from distant cultures were presented in European collections in the age of discovery and the early colonial period. These collections attempted to glorify their owners and to celebrate their access to distant and exotic cultures, while simultaneously attesting to the authenticity of these cultures. This contemporary piece of Ethiopian embroidery, by contrast, questions the very possibility of authenticity: at first glance, it “masquerades” as an authentic Ethiopian artifact, yet a more sustained examination reveals how it undermines the validity of ethnic, national, or religious categories of classification.
Lead actress: Aviva Almaz Rahamim
Supporting actresses: Mazal Baro, Yaron Gette, Rivka Chana
Filming and editing: Or Even Tov
Hebrew translation: Alamork Marsha
English translation: Maya Shimony
After-Effects editing: Talia Link
Sound editing: Aviram Vilensky
Title song: Asnakech Worku
Special thanks to: Smadar Messing
Courtesy of the Almaz Project for traditional Ethiopian embroidery.
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