The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NLMiriam Hillawi Abraham, 2025
The Cosmic Outpost, Jan van Eyck Open Studios, NL
Photo by Romy Finke
The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue is a culmination of several years of research and exploration into precolonial cosmologies and spatial orders rooted in the African Sahel extending to the Horn of Africa (with The Canadian Centre for Architecture).
Using methods of abstraction, deflection, and overlay, the work examines the tensions between the accessibility or legibility that cultural preservation demands and the willful opacity of sacred orders and the unseen world of spirit realms and "non-worlds."
“Gazelle with celestial ankles,
the pearls are my stars on the night of your skin,
Delighted games of the mind,
red-gold reflections upon your flaming skin.
In the shadow of your hair my anguish flees near the suns of your eyes.”
- Léopold Sédar Senghor, Femme noire, Chants d’ombre, 1964
The catalogue is intended to be a nomadic guide or analogue toolkit to navigate our shared sky of the Northern Celestial Hemisphere above the equator. The space functions as a cosmic outpost, where one can study terrestrial schemas, fragmented geographies, unruly desert matter and disobedient stars.
The work is ultimately an invitation to reorient oneself against the gaze of the cosmos. Here the talisman serves as a navigational device that persists even in the face of displacement and dispossession.
The Cosmic Outpost, Jan van Eyck Open Studios, NL
Photo by Romy Finke
Gum arabic: gum acacia, gum sudani, Senegal gum, ሙጫ – tree resin harvested from acacia trees growing in the Sahel, Sub Saharan Africa, or the "Gum Belt," to be more precise.
Across the Sahel, this gum is burned with incense and used in both food and traditional medicine. Seemingly precious and magical, it is present in almost all market goods, down to the most mundane object like the postage stamp (used as a “lickable adhesive”).
But this oozing, sticky, viscous, crystalline, stateless material is more than an extractable potable resource. It is a language of trees and a record of all life on earth.
2D Gum lensed talisman and Cast Tin Talisman / 2025
The Cosmic Outpost, Jan van Eyck Open Studios, NL
Photo by Romy Finke