To view this work please visit our Currents Virtual Festival site on the Ohyah platform. Click on the External Media link above. Once you board the train get off at the Virtual Reality stop.

I was 20 years old, the first time I met another Ethiopian-American like me. For a long time, I only knew how to see myself, my culture, my appearance, in direct contrast to "Whiteness" aka "normal". I was "other". Ferenj was born out of the need for a space to express my suppressed identity on my own terms as unapologetically and radically "normal" and to affirm to anyone else who relates to my story that we're out here, we exist, we are not invisible. Memory, reality, and the digital converge in this immersive memoir about Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity in a virtual, post-spatial home created from images collected from friends and family.