ይስከን // Yesken :: FILM SCREENING & COFFEE CEREMONY

In the organizer's words:

Film Screening & Coffee Ceremony 23.05.2025 18:00
With Ainslee Alem Robson '
LANGUAGE The event takes place in English
FREE ENTRY Donations welcome
ACCESS SAVVY is accessible by wheelchair

We cordially invite you to a film screening and coffee ceremony with our current resident Ainslee Alem Robson.

"Yesken" in Amharic refers to the time it takes for coffee grounds to settle at the bottom of the jebena (clay pot) in the traditional cultural practice of brewing coffee from scratch. The jebena is unfiltered, the grounds must settle, and the time it takes cannot be rushed. It is a moment of pause.

This presentation of Ainslee Alem Robson's practice is an invitation to pause and reflect on vessels of intergenerational memory that are non-traditional forms of archive(ing) - such as food, restaurants in immigrant neighborhoods, 3D-scanning, and community elders.

The gathering will feature screenings of her works centering "Empress Taytu", her family's restaurant in Cleveland as an infrastructure of counterarchive, and an experimental Ethiopian coffee ceremony as a methodology of resistance and reflection - opening an aromatic portal for discourse and the charting of cartographies of belonging between diasporic communities in Berlin.

Ainslee Alem Robson is an Ethiopian-American writer-director, media artist and cook who crafts emancipatory narratives and counterimaginings harnessing film, game engine technology, food, memory and archives as her ingredients. Refusing temporal linearity, Ainslee's work speaks to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas. Scrutinizing sites of erasure within hegemonic discourse, she aims to deconstruct hierarchies and colonial legacies. She crafts characters, worlds, and meals that center flavor, agency, complexity, and resistance. Robson has exhibited her film installation "Ferenj" in the "Guests From the Future" category at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. Amongst other art spaces her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by MoMA, the New York Times, Ars Electronica, and Vellum LA. Her debut non-fiction work Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR (2020) premiered at Tribeca and was showcased at film festivals internationally. She has guest lectured at universities around the world including UCLA, the GSA in Johannesburg, MIT, Cornell, UCSD, NYU, and ZhDK. Robson is a former Sundance "Art of Practice" Fellow (2021), Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow (2022-23), co-recipient of the IDA Pare Lorentz grant and BPM PitchBlack grant. She participated in the 2025 cohort of Sankofa Film Institute's "Around the Fire" screenwriting and directing lab led by Haile Gerima.

FUNDING This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.