Miriam Hillawi Abraham

The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus is a series of visual narratives that unfold over the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia. It began as a strategy to navigate and reconcile the nefarious hegemonies of personal architectural heritage, those of colonial Hegelian origins as well as those born out of local imperialism. The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus is a mode of architectural transmutation that slips past the physical barriers of deterioration and decay into the imaginary. For The Laboratory of the Future, this self-contained non-world is mined to produce an installation that looks across the strata of time and terra from the perspective of a detached ‘guest from the future’. The installation is a microcosm of the Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus, where an animated film follows a rotating gaze that gradually burrows deeper into the centre of a physical model of the virtual terrain, a God-like view that mines for its secrets, unsettling earth and waking long-forgotten ghosts.