Unorthodox Unfolding: a mural of defiance revisits a pivotal moment in history through contemporary reflection. In 1936, during the League of Nations assembly, Emperor Haile Selassie I stood before the world to denounce the fascist invasion of Ethiopia. Amidst interruptions by Italian journalists, Romanian diplomat Nicolae Titulescu’s sharp retort—“À la porte, les sauvages!”—restored the room’s order. Upon his return to Ethiopia, Haile Selassie commissioned painter Agegnehu Engida to immortalize the moment under the dome of the Cathedral Church in Addis Ababa, an act that defied artistic convention by turning a political event into a sacred mural.

My work responds to Engida’s mural through a contemporary reimagining painted on goat-skin parchment. This reworking becomes less a replication and more a meditation on the impossibility of representation itself: how history, faith, and resistance intertwine and unfold through form.

Unorthodox Unfolding invites reflection on courage, dissent, and the transformative agency of art. By engaging with this moment of resistance, I aim to trace how acts of defiance become inscribed into our shared visual and historical memory.

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