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and iconography.
The table itself takes the form of a lion — a reference to Selassie and the Lion of Judah — and becomes a stage where Ethiopia and Italy face one another through two distinct sets of pieces. On the Ethiopian side, the details are drawn from the Holy Trinity Church, where Selassie is buried: the rooks reference its architecture, while the bishops borrow from its religious iconography.
The Queen takes the form of a Black Madonna, while Black Jesus becomes the King. Afrofuturism seeps in through our depiction of the knight: a soldier riding a lion into battle. The Italian pieces draw from Catholic ecclesiastical architecture and figures, alongside the recurring symbolism of the wolf within Italian mythology. The pawns and colour scheme are both informed by paintings of the Ethiopian wars encountered at the Addis Ababa Ethnological Museum, where Black and white subjects were surprisingly presented on the same visual footing.
The starting point for the work was the Mercato, where we watched fiercely competitive games of checkers played with bottle caps amid the movement and commerce of the market. In homage to this simple and magical moment, the chess pieces sit on bottle-cap bases, with a separate set provided for playing checkers.