Môt are the traditional woven baskets of the Harari people. Each of the thirty recognised styles once served a specific purpose: the oxât môt, for instance, was used to hold injera, the Ethiopian flatbread, and had a designated place on the wall of the main room of a Harari home. Today, most of those functions are forgotten.

Despite this, the môt collections remain, mounted on the walls of homes across Wyndham. Some families have gone further, installing raised platforms inside their homes to recreate the nadaba, the traditional tiered seating of a Harari house, so that the môt might occupy the same spatial relationship to the room that they always have.

As Long As I'm Near... documents these spaces. Using a wide-angle lens, I will photograph these rooms with a slow shutter speed, allowing the movement of daily life to blur around the môt, which remain sharp and still. Each image will carry the estate and/or street address of the home where it was taken, for example, Lucerne Street, Tarneit VIC 3029. Wyndham is home to families from all over the world doing quietly extraordinary things to maintain ties with cultures that modern life threatens to absorb.

This series is one portrait of that effort.

About Ammar Yonis

Ammar Yonis is a Harari-Australian multidisciplinary artist based in Wyndham. His work has been exhibited at venues including Footscray Community Arts, Hillvale Gallery, the Immigration Museum, and the Islamic Museum of Australia, earning accolades including the Capturing Culture Competition Prize (Immigration Museum, 2022) and Local Acquisition Prize Runner-up (Footscray Art Prize, 2023).

His practice also includes filmmaking and writing, with Underground (2022) marking his transition from still to moving images. He later directed Makan Makeen (2024) in Tangier, Morocco, and Hassan (2025), which has been selected for several domestic and international film festivals, winning an award at Cine Paris Film Festival. In 2023, Ammar participated in Arts House's Makeshift Black Marks writing program for Black Victorian-based artists. He later led a series of creative writing workshops at Dianella Community Centre, Tarneit, where participants developed their own short stories.

Image credit: As Long As I’m Near… (2026) by Ammar Yonis. Photographed by Christo Crocker.