Ethiopia's water contradictions, sliced and rewoven into single photographs (interview)

Addis Ababa's illuminated public fountains and the national promise of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam sit hours away from women carrying jerrycans in Entoto and stagnant taps in Ankober; the pair wanted that gap made physical rather than argued.

Photograph both sides of Ethiopia's water and energy divide, then slice the prints and hand-weave them back together so the contradiction shares one physical plane.

Working from field observation and community dialogue, Ribka Sissay built ten woven images pairing photographs often taken at the same place and moment — glowing fountains against candlelit rooms, urban neon against a small rural solar device, firewood stacks against cleared fields — cutting and interlacing them by hand so neither reality can be cropped out.

No commercial metrics apply. Sissay says the weaving forces an undeniable physical collision between conflicting realities, disrupting the passive, romanticised way rural domestic labour is usually consumed.

In an interview with The Contrapuntal editor Ilaha Abasli, Ethiopian artist Ribka Sissay and researcher Nahom Teklu describe "Threads of Light and Water", a mixed-media work built from conversations in Buna Chats for the Everyday Nile project. Sissay says placing photographs side by side relies on passive comparison, while weaving forces an undeniable physical collision between conflicting realities within a single plane — and that the tactile, labour-intensive process mirrors the human struggle with the intangible power structures governing water and energy access.

The ten woven images pair conflicting photographs, often captured at the same location and moment: Addis Ababa's illuminated public fountains interlaced with women carrying heavy jerrycans in Entoto; the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam's national promise against candlelit domestic rooms; rural solar setups woven against the neon of urban fountains; stacked firewood against cleared fields. Teklu says the photographs of women carrying water were never simple documentation — Entoto has significant water resources, so the images hold both the labour and the unrealised potential.

Sissay says slicing and reweaving deliberately disrupts the passive, romanticised lens through which rural domestic labour is often consumed: the gendered labour that sustains daily life gets woven straight into the image of national energy and municipal infrastructure, keeping the vulnerability created by inadequate utilities central to conversations about extraction and urban growth.

The technique is the argument: cut-and-woven photographs make water inequality physical instead of rhetorical.

The pairings are community-verified tensions from Buna Chats, not outside observations imposed on the subjects.

Photographing abundance and scarcity in the same place at the same moment removes the easy 'two different worlds' excuse.

When a subject is usually consumed as two separate stories, a medium that physically locks them together — cut, interlaced, un-croppable — argues harder than any side-by-side comparison.

The work and interview were published on The Contrapuntal on 7 October 2026. No exhibition plans or further results are reported in the source.