Last year Hoek visited Ethiopia several times. During his first... visit he encountered a man, standing in the middle of a roundabout, looking at the sky, shouting unintelligible things at it. In both of his nostrils he had put a cigarette, he was wearing old seventies pilot glasses and his outfit consisted of many layers of ragged and worn out pieces of clothing. He turned out to be a so called Sweet Crazy. One of the many mentally ill vagabonds who live in the streets of the city.
Hoek thought it was fascinating that the people who pass for crazy people there, could easily go on the catwalk here with their outfits, self made, scraped together and shaped by time. Back in the Netherland the Sweet Crazies didn’t leave Hoek and so he decided to return to Adis Ababa to start a photography project. Together with his local friend Salomon he tried to befriend the Sweet Crazies and tried to take their picture. He decided not to photograph them between the rubbish, but to give them a star like setting in one of the many typical Ethiopian photo studio’s. Hoeks encounters with the Sweet Crazies of Adis Ababa resulted in an intriguing series of portraits, on show at Artpocalypse Collective.
Opening
Saturday October 8th - 4 pm