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Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other    

Onassis Foundation, Athens, Greece
Miriam Hillawi Abraham, 2026

Material Catalogue / 2026
Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other, Onassis Foundation, GR
           

Borrowing its title from bell hooks’ “Eating The Other”, this work is concerned with the desire, power and metabolic transformations that take place between intelligent beings, both human and otherwise.  




Installation view & Live Performance / 2026
Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other, Onassis Foundation, GR
Photo Credit: Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2026 © Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi



“I am only concerned with what is not mine”


- Oswald de Andrade, Cannibalist Manifesto

The work is presented as an erroneous catalogue, an unruly taxonomy of “living materials” collected from Ethiopia, along The Nile and beyond. Materials such as these map a spectral geography, charting invisible linkages as they are carried across political and corporeal boundaries, loaded into caravans, windswept and replanted elsewhere since time immemorial.

And as such, they are not beholden to the rules imposed by Western classical systems of categorization and taxonomy. Documented in the format of a fictional materia medica, the collection is riddled with misnomers (that have led to woeful mistakes in the past) and farfetched substitutes with deceptive similarities, revealing the interplay of desire and power between Same and (Exotic) Other. The installation will be activated through a 15 minute performance by an unreliable apothecarist who will offer the materials as solutions and remedies for various needs.


Installation view & Live Performance / 2026
Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other, Onassis Foundation, GR 
Photo Credit: Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2026 © Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi

This formal tradition of desiccating and flattening a living organism in order to “preserve” or study, I found to be rather contradictory or absurd. This in turn led me to my own method of flattening my archive by directly scanning my items in a flatbed digital scanner and then proceeding to print them at the Sektor 30 workspace using photopolymer and traditional etching (intaglio). 

Installation view & Live Performance / 2026
Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other, Onassis Foundation, GR
Photo Credit: Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2026 © Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi
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MIRIAM HILLAWI ABRAHAM


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Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She has worked as a game-code instructor at Bay Area Video Coalition’s youth program for over three years and is now a Mellon researcher for the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Digital Now multidisciplinary project. Abraham's work has been featured in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as part of the Special Project “Guests from the Future”,  as well the "/imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual" exhibition at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema.”



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