Immersive Experience

At the Toledo Museum of Art, Yatreda set its digital art within a live Ethiopian coffee ceremony. The ceremony was led by three figures: the Coffee Muse, who roasted, brewed, and served; the Musician, who played the masenqo, a single-stringed Ethiopian instrument; and the Storyteller, who narrated alongside a visual sequence of artwork.

The Storyteller’s narration read the ceremony as a frame for Yatreda’s practice, naming each element of the coffee ceremony and its connection to the work: the deliberate pace of brewing and serving with the slowed time of the motion portraits; the herb of tena’adam and the communal pour with the themes of cultural preservation and collective making that run through the collection. The cups carried this in material form. The glass was hand-blown as part of the Toledo Museum of Art’s Digital Artist in Residence program and tinted to the dark hue of a traditional clay cup. The object was remade for a new context without losing its reference.

An NFC chip was cast inside each hand-blown glass cup. The cup a guest received during the ceremony was theirs to keep, and at its close they held their phone to the glass. A single artwork was then revealed.

Each guest collected one of 180 coffee proverbs. Yatreda wrote these proverbs during the museum’s digital artist residency in Toledo, Ohio, interviewing local residents and drawing them from the distance between the Ethiopian coffee ceremony and the American coffee experience. Each guest received one at random upon tapping, in many cases creating their first digital wallet.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads, a major United States exhibition of Ethiopian art spanning 1,750 years of history, was co-organized by three museums and traveled across the country: the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (December 2023 to March 2024), the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (April to July 2024), and finally the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (August to November 2024). For its concluding chapter, the Toledo Museum of Art collaborated with Yatreda to inspire visits in person, creating the Queen’s Medallion.

The medallion is conceived as a diplomatic passport from the Abyssinian Queen: a token of her protection that grants the bearer safe passage from Toledo to her realm in ancient Abyssinia. The Queen’s portrait and an inscription in Ge’ez, an ancient language of Ethiopia, were 3D-printed into a mold, cast in bronze, and forged to Yatreda’s specifications. The inscription translates: “Safe passage from Abyssinia to Toledo, Queen of the land of Abyssinia.”

The finished bronze medallion was filmed in situation and minted as a single-channel video artwork in an edition of 280. To collect it, guests scanned a QR code and followed the prompts to create their own digital wallet.

For Yatreda’s solo exhibition, Let’s Slow Down Time Together, the coffee ceremony returned in November 2025 as a live performance at Load Gallery in Barcelona, held amongst the digital art shown throughout the space.