Image Caption: For My Dear Mother, Mother, I can never find someone like you. Because I know how burning with hardship you raised me. Ever since the day you left my father, without leaving me, without boredom, as long as your ability and age allowed it, you raised me. And, without being full of you, without you seeing me like this grown up, that you were separated from me makes me very sad. Mommy, let me remind you how you raised me back then. Carrying me on your back, when the rain pounded on you, selling boiled potatoes to raise me until I believe I was one or two years old. And you didn’t rest when I got a little older. You’d take any day job you can find, that’s how we began to live. After a long time, my father came again and saw us. But, Mommy, what kind of person is he? Why is it that people don’t pity each other, love each other? My father is one of these people. Do you remember, per month 30 birr, he’d give us and leave. But you never waited for his handout. When we found food, we ate, when we didn’t, we ate roasted chickpeas and drank water, and slept nestled together as if we were a single person. Isn’t it sad, Mommy, if you were here, my education level and my age would have matched. Yours, your loving, Asra Assembly presents “Sudden Flowers,” a project by Eric Gottesman in collaboration with Sudden Flowers, an art collective of young people in Addis Abba. This NFT collection explores the complex lives of and harsh realities of young people growing up in one neighborhood in Addis Ababa between 2000 and 2014 who, in the wake of their parents’ deaths, experienced the trauma of grief, structural violence, and AIDS-related stigma. "Sudden Flowers'' was a fourteen-year-long artistic collaboration with a collective of young people in the Shiromeda/Sidist Kilo neighborhood of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The young collective delved into the possibilities of image making as a tool for self-expression, healing and teaching others. Together, they made photographs, films and installations and displayed these works in their neighborhood, throughout the city and the country. Each of their projects is like a “lyric” in larger poetic structure. Eric Gottesman is an artist whose work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations. His projects question accepted notions of power and, by engaging communities in critical self-reflection and creative expression, propose models for repair. Gottesman’s work is always collaborative, and he has never made an artwork alone. His work has been shown in museums like MoMA/PS1, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, MFA Boston, Houston Center for Photography, MoCA Cleveland, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Gottesman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, an Artadia awardee, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist and a co-founder of For Freedoms, an initiative for art and civic engagement that won the 2017 ICP-Infinity Award and was named the "largest creative collaboration in United States history" by TIME Magazine.