Jermay Michael Gabriel is an Italian-Ethiopian-Eritrean transdisciplinary artist, born in Addis Ababa. He lives and works in Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, in the department of Applied Arts. Michael Gabriel's work is based on an experimental, and often extreme, effort to resist the permanence and elusiveness of the Italian colonial archive through the subversion of its symbols of power.
Jermay Michael Gabriel's practice intersects identity claims and activism with a profound analysis of Italy's colonial past and its ideological, linguistic, political and socioeconomic persistence. It is evident from the fervour of his dialectic how Jermay's practice stems first and foremost from a personal need, from a need to assert his own identity as a black Italian, of Ethiopian and Eritrean origin, later adopted in Italy. As he himself states, his research moves from the Horn of Africa to Europe, passing through Italy and crossing what this implies at the level of past, present and future geopolitics, but above all identity, of the stories involved on this route.
Most of Jermay's works deal with operations of ‘exorcising’ colonial trauma, conceiving this as a malaise that persists and is passed on between generations, translating into what he defines as a profound melancholy of origins, of those who feel neither fully Italian nor more African. A feeling peculiar to every diaspora which, as Gilroy recently theorised, derives first and foremost from the external inability to recognise and properly value the multicultural identity that now makes up our cities, even in Italy.
