The Homeless Wanderer: a oneiric visual exploration of identity and belonging by Aïda Muluneh.

Vogue

a day ago

The exhibition is titled 'Homeless Wanderer.' What inspired this name, and what does it signify in the context of your work?
The title 'Homeless Wanderer' is inspired by a song by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose piano compositions evoke deep memory and nostalgia. Her music mirrors the spirit of this collection, which spans different periods of my work across East and West Africa. The phrase reflects a personal and collective sense of displacement, a feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere. It speaks to the in-betweenness of identity and the search for self through land, memory, and time. My work traces the invisible borders between myth and memory, body and land, the seen and the felt.
You've spent many years as a photojournalist for The Washington Post. How did that experience shape your current artistic practice, which is often described as dreamlike and suspended in time?
Working as a photojournalist for many years taught me two essential things: how to construct a story through images and how to anticipate moments. Through my travels and work on diverse subjects, I began to encounter experiences and emotions that couldn't be fully expressed within the confines of photojournalism. While my artistic practice is rooted in that experience, it became a space to revisit moments, memories, and questions that journalism could not hold. Photojournalism taught me the discipline of observation, the urgency to document, and the ethics of seeing. But over time, I became more drawn to what lies beyond the frame, the silences, the emotional residue, the unseen histories. My work emerges from that tension between documenting external truths and exploring something more internal and symbolic. That's why my imagery exists within its own universe.
Your work captures a vision of Africa that Jacqueline Ceresoli describes as 'untouched by Western cultural colonization.' You've mentioned that to truly engage with this vision, you needed to be physically immersed in the land and its communities. Can you elaborate on how this connection informs your process?
I often say I wouldn't be making the same work if I still lived in the West. Returning to my birthplace was essential, I had to learn about the land, the history, the people, and the power of quiet moments. From afar, Ethiopia can feel like an illusion or a faded dream, but living within it revealed its many layers. This unmasking was crucial to understanding my people.