Yatreda ያጥሬዳ is a family based collective of Ethiopian artists, founded in 2021 and led by Kiya Tadele, working between Ethiopia, Kenya and the United States. The name comes from the Amharic words for fence and debt. They work across film, digital art and sculpture, and are best known for black and white motion portraits, figures held in slow motion, filmed with the composure of a studio photograph and the duration of a film. The collective describes its register as tizita, the Ethiopian understanding of nostalgia, and draws on oral history, folk tales and the ceremonial life of modern Ethiopia. The blockchain enters the work as a means of preservation rather than a subject: a way of keeping cultural memory intact as its material carriers change. The project began with Kiya Tadele's wish to make a film about Adwa, the Ethiopian victory of 1896 over Italian colonial forces, and she came to it after several years working as a model.
Their series include Kingdoms of Ethiopia (2021), Strong Hair (2022), a hundred motion portraits of Ethiopian hairstyles, and Abyssinian Queen (2024). In 2024 they were named Digital Artist in Residence at the Toledo Museum of Art, where they created the immersive installation House of Yatreda within the exhibition Ethiopia at the Crossroads, accompanied by a live Ethiopian coffee ceremony and a bronze medallion cast at the University of Toledo foundry. The museum acquired Abyssinian Queen for its permanent collection, in what it describes as the first purchase of an artwork by a major cultural institution using cryptocurrency, and a second work from the series was sold at Christie's the same year. Vitalik Buterin has cited the collective's work as a use of the technology he considers worthwhile. They have been covered by Wallpaper, nft now, Outland and OkayAfrica.
In 2026 Plan X presented Digital Nefse as a solo booth at Art Dubai, extending the collective's series of physical sculptures embodying digital souls, which began with Twenty-First Century Akodama. Each sculpture is made with ancestral methods so that it carries the memory held in the material itself, and each is paired with a digital nefse, a soul, in the form of a cinematic narrative minted on the blockchain, so that the legend and history of the object travel with it.
