Dawit L. Petros

The small east African nation of Eritrea’s origins are rooted in the crucible of anti-colonial transformation and articulated through the modernist language of sovereignty and revolutionary nationalism. Its complicated relationship to the 21st-century world is the product of a specific historical trajectory that began in the 19th Century and moved through Italian colonialism, British occupation, a failed federation with Ethiopia, and a 31-year war for independence. The short post-independence era of the 1990s was marred by a boundary dispute culminating in the second Eritrea-Ethiopian War (1998-2000).

Strategic Withdrawal highlights multiple narratives of departure that the complex history has generated, a series of strategic withdrawals. The first is the 19th-century account of an Abyssinian scholar’s journey to Italy, the earliest written in Tigrinya, an important literary language of the Horn. The text is emblematic of historical movements across national boundaries in multiple directions, indicative of the interdependent relationship of modernism and colonialism. The other departures are contemporary crossings across the Mediterranean towards Lampedusa, Italy, and other access points into Fortress Europe. These current migrations point to irresolvable entanglements of unstable boundaries, which continue to produce political instability, economic crisis, and large-scale departures.

Strategic Withdrawal uses photography, three-dimensional cartographic forms, memorials and spatial markers (stele) to unsettle and render precarious systems of territorial demarcation and the logic that firmly secured and delineated boundaries, stemming the flow of populations and forms.