Faces of Kenyan Coffee
Franz Cerami portrays the human landscape of Kenya’s coffee value chain.

Nairobi, 2 June 2026 — On the occasion of the Italian Republic Day, the Residence of the Ambassador of Italy in Nairobi will host Jute Portraits. Faces of Kenyan Coffee, a new artistic project by Franz Cerami, promoted by the Embassy of Italy in Kenya, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi and UNIDO.

Jute Portraits stems from the artist’s encounter with the workers of Kenya’s coffee value chain. Through approximately three hundred video portraits, Cerami creates a visual narrative dedicated to the faces, landscapes, communities and territories connected to coffee production.

The project brings together video, digital painting, manual interventions, graphite, colour and natural materials. The portraits, filmed in Kenya, are subsequently developed by the artist through a frame-by-frame painting process, becoming animated images projected onto buildings in Nairobi and, on 2 June, in the gardens of the Residence of the Ambassador of Italy.

For the installation at the Residence, large structures made of bamboo, rope and jute have been created, designed by the artist and produced with the contribution of local artisans. Jute, a material symbolically linked to the transport and memory of coffee, becomes a pictorial surface, a projection screen and the living matter of the work.

Alongside the large video installation, the project also includes a series of physical works printed on jute. Some of these works will become part of important institutional collections in Kenya, including the Embassy of Italy in Nairobi, the Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi, the National Museums of Kenya and the United Nations Office at Nairobi.

“Jute Portraits stems from a dialogue with the people who work in Kenya’s coffee value chain. From this experience came approximately three hundred portraits, which I later painted by hand, frame by frame, transforming them into moving images. For me, this work is a way of narrating a collective identity, a human landscape made of faces, territories and relationships. It is a visual narrative that brings Italy and Kenya into dialogue through the faces of men and women, labour and the memory of coffee culture.”
— Franz Cerami

With Jute Portraits. Faces of Kenyan Coffee, Franz Cerami continues his artistic research into the relationship between city, community and portraiture. After projects developed in numerous international contexts, the artist brings to Nairobi a work that connects contemporary art, cultural diplomacy, international cooperation and the memory of territories.

The installation confirms the role of art as a tool for building relationships between cultures, communities and institutions, transforming the faces of coffee workers into a great human landscape projected into the public and institutional space of the city.

Institutional partners
Embassy of Italy in Kenya
Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi
UNIDO — United Nations Industrial Development Organization