What The Wise Awakens To 

Music: Yizzac

“What the wise awakens to” is a short animation film made from individually hand-painted frames. 

The narration of the film is based on the famous allegory of the cave from the Republic. The allegory of the cave as an archetypically structured story has a lot of similarities with other similar myths and stories on the same subject. For instance, with the life of Buddha from the east. 

Both stories begin from more or less similar settings. In both Plato's cave and Buddha's youth, the reality is carefully constructed. The protagonist from Plato lived in a cave where what he sees is selected and structured as shadows. Buddha also spends his pre-enlightened life in a world devoid of hunger, illness, and death: curated and controlled by his father.  

These two stories diverge only in their picture of what the real world is: what their protagonist awakens to. According to the allegory, the protagonist will leave the cave to awaken to the splendor of the real world. Radically better. While Buddha awakens to the suffering of the world. This is also where the interest of the film lays: what the knower awakens to.

The film will be premiered in April. 

What the wise awakens to




The study of an artifact on display is part of a painting series, developed as an antithesis to the dominant practice of representation of the artworks and artifacts from Africa and the global south in Western museums and institutions without paying much attention to the reality the works are part of. This series of works want to render visible the cultural, human also a political biography of the works. Which ranges from the people who made them to the violence used to acquire them.



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Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen

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