THE GRAINS OF WORDS

The Grains of Words is a floor-based poem made from letters sculpted in coffee and tea, transforming language into presence. The passage, drawn from Bob Marley’s song War, references Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974) and a key figure in anti-colonial movements, whose 1963 speech at the United Nations called for an end to racial injustice. This act of transposing speech into song and then into soil asserts that words are not only spoken, sung, or written—they can be planted, ingrained into history itself. 

Coffee becomes a bearer of memory—ritual, resistance, and gathering—especially in Ethiopia, its origin and a symbol of survival under colonization. Installed over ancient mosaics of gladiators and beasts—figures once enslaved for public spectacle—the work draws a quiet link between past exploitation and persistent global inequality. Mutu’s poem seeps into the museum floor, refusing monumentality of form, but insisting on the weight of its message.

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