Negus

The Italian duo Invernomuto (Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi) looked throughout their personal archive of photographs and documents for a very curious book titled Negus that was published in 2014 by Humboldt Books in Milan. The publication works as a visual journey through the history of King Haile Selassie, a remarkable and mysterious political and religious figure that became a symbol of Rastafarian cults while being involved in Italian propaganda supporting Mussolini's occupation in Ethiopia in the 1930s.

Negus is not a photobook as we know them, but considering it as one, we have to go back to its set of photographs as the main clue to understand how the artists’ documentary practice could allow them to create their own atlas based on the imagery of an African King. The documentary research starts with the finding of W. Robert Moore’s photographs documenting King Haile Selassie’s coronation published on the National Geographic Magazine in June 1931. Based on this first finding, both artist have been able to recreate intriguing connections between the figure of this Ethiopian king and other curious historical events: Margus Garvey’s pan-African Liberationist religious ideas from the 1920s, the effigy of King Haile Selassie – whose iconographic and intellectual ideas are venerated in the Jamaican Rastafarian cult - and the strange story of a wounded soldier returning to Vernasca, Italy, during the Italian occupation in Ethiopia in 1936.

The astonishing set of images, that are spread in the book as illustrations of this visual journey, come from collected archives and here are combined to compose a new reconstruction of historical facts that holds to one single iconic event, the coronation of an African King. 

Who is Haile Selassie, the last Negus of Ethiopia, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah? Why did an African king crowned in Abyssinia, a ruined country, become considered as the God of a Jamaican ritual? Why is a soldier burning the portrait of the King after returning from war? And why does Jamaica Times denounce the King of Kings Haile Selassie as a dangerous leader?

No answers are given in this book. The critic and the historical review of this king's influence in the Italian and Jamaican history is all in the images and in their sequencing.

Buy the book here