There is a particular intimacy in seeing the face of someone whose words have already lived in us. A voice first heard through pages, a grief or joke carried by language, suddenly has eyes, hands, and posture.

That small shock of recognition gave “Vision of Words” its charge when Ethiopia’s first photographic exhibition devoted to its literary community opened at Goethe-Institut on Tuesday, May 12, 2026.

Curated by Feben Fancho (PhD) and organised by Asayehegn Asfaw, the Exhibition brings together portraits of 36 authors, poets, playwrights, translators, performers, screenwriters, and literary critics. It places older literary figures, including Ayalneh Mulatu and Asaf Damte, alongside younger artists such as Natnael Tadelle (Don) and Zerihun Taye (Mallo), whose work spans slam poetry, digital performance, and experimental forms. The result is an argument about continuity. Ethiopian literature is changing, but it is not severed from the forms that shaped it.

The opening drew writers, readers, artists, musicians, relatives, and literature lovers into a room thick with talk about books, poetry, language, and memory. Formal remarks gave way to music by Moseb Band and an acoustic guitar performance by Carlo Ertola. Between the portraits, guests moved with food and drinks, stopping to recognise a face, ask after a book, or talk about the absence of writers in visual archives.

Senegni Creative, the writers who agreed to sit for the portraits, Moseb Band, and Carlo Ertola helped bring the evening together. Yet the Exhibition’s larger point went beyond an opening night. It asked what it means to preserve a literary culture beyond the printed book, and what is lost when the makers of language are remembered only by name. The idea is tied to Feben’s own path.

Before curating the Exhibition, she worked as the general manager of "Gitim Sitim", an open-mic platform that created space for poets and performers. She helped make her one of the recognisable voices in the spoken-word community. In 2024, she represented Ethiopia at the International Youth Poetry Festival organised by the China Writers Association, an experience that brought international recognition and exposed her to literary preservation projects abroad.

While in China, she visited archives devoted to well-known writers from earlier decades. There she saw how literary figures could be documented, remembered, and visually preserved. That encounter helped shape the idea that became “Vision of Words.” Dirk Skiba, a German photographer behind the project, has a website that mainly features portraits, but Feben hopes her Exhibition can mark the beginning of a broader platform, one that archives local writers, their works, histories, and contributions to culture.

At the Exhibition, established names appear beside younger poets and performers who are testing new forms of expression through spoken word and digital platforms. The arrangement shows not a hierarchy but a conversation across time. Literature, in this telling, is not fixed in bookshelves or classrooms. It moves from stage to screen, from page to microphone, and from memory to image.