Franz Cerami's 'Jute Portraits' puts Kenya's coffee workers at heart of international exhibition
When Italian artist Franz Cerami arrived in Kenya, he sought faces rather than familiar postcard images of landscapes or monuments.
Across coffee-growing and processing communities, he photographed about 300 workers whose labour and resilience underpin one of the world’s most valued beverages. The result is Jute Portraits, a multimedia project that places Kenya’s coffee workers at the centre of a global cultural conversation.
For Kenya’s creative sector, this is more than a visiting artist project. Cerami is one of Italy’s leading contemporary visual artists, known for blending art, technology and storytelling through digital art, video mapping and public installations.
Born in Naples, he transforms buildings and public spaces into living canvases. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has been appointed three times as an ambassador of Italian Design in the World by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
