YESKEN
An itinerant coffee ceremony installationThe first edition of Yesken took place in May 2025 at Savvy Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas in Berlin, Germany as part of a Micro-Residency titled “Standing in the Cracks of Multiple Histories” supported by the Terra Foundation. The second edition will take place in August 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico at Beta Local as part of the Invocations Program in collaboration with Sociedad del Tiempo Libre.
“Yesken” in Amharic refers to the time it takes for coffee grounds to settle at the bottom of the jebena (clay pot) in the traditional cultural practice of brewing coffee from scratch. The jebena is unfiltered, the grounds must settle, and the time it takes cannot be rushed. It is a moment of pause.
This presentation of Ainslee Alem Robson’s practice is an invitation to pause and reflect on vessels of intergenerational memory that are non-traditional forms of archive(ing) – such as food, restaurants in immigrant neighborhoods, 3D-scanning, and community elders.
The gathering will feature screenings of her film and VR works centering “Empress Taytu”, her family’s restaurant in Cleveland as an infrastructure of counterarchive, and an experimental Ethiopian coffee ceremony as a methodology of resistance and reflection – opening an aromatic portal for discorse and the charting of cartographies of belonging between diasporic communities in Berlin.
Read more:
https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2025/standing-in-the-cracks-of-multiple-histories-residency-ainslee-alem-robson/
Experimental & Emancipatory Films
ainslee.robson@gmail.com@ahhslay @ferenjvr
copyright 2025
