Description of curatorial process:

May 2008
I was invited to participate in an exhibit about experimental forms of documentary photography curated by Nina Felshin at Wesleyan University in the United States.  I decided to attempt a transcontinental curatorial collaboration with the children of Sudden Flowers, a group with whom I’d been working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for nine years. 

June 2008
I went to Addis Ababa to meet with them and showed them the curatorial statement.   We discussed possible approaches to installing work at Wesleyan.  We decided that, although time was short, one girl, Mahalet Muluneh, would make a book to distribute to attendees of the exhibit and that her brothers, Tensae and Bereket Muluneh, would make a film that would describe the history of our project together.  I returned to the United States with this idea and told Nina about it. 

August 2008
Shortly before the exhibit opened, we realized that the books and film would not be ready until mid-way through the exhibition’s run.  So they suggested to me over the phone that I should install the photographs from our time together for the opening. 

September 2008
Following the initial concept of Tensae’s and Bereket’s film, I (with the help of my brother Michael, my mother Jean and Lee Hamilton at the Wesleyan Museum of Art) installed hundreds of our photographs at Wesleyan University in the form of a 28-foot high graph. This curve of the graph represented: the task of representing the history of the community, the growth of our project over time, and the increase in the sheer number of photographs of Ethiopia with which our images have to compete.  I took pictures to document the installation.

The exhibition opened.

October 2008    
I returned to Addis Ababa to show the pictures of the installation to the children of Sudden Flowers.  I asked what they thought. I recorded their responses.  They also gave me the books and the film they made for the exhibition and instructions on how to distribute them.

November 2008
I returned to Wesleyan to present the responses on a panel about documentary process.  I passed out the books according to their instructions.  I installed the film they made, along with their audio responses to my installation of our collective work. "If I had installed this show..I would have bathed the pictures in blue light..". -- Yonas Endale, Sudden Flowers

December 7 2008
The exhibition closed.