Wendie Zahibo

Wendie Zahibo’s work lies at the intersection of photography, collage, poetry, and research. It stems from a personal experience of dispersion: born in Guadeloupe within a family with Ivory Coast and Central African Republic roots, she is now living between the island and France. The artist carries multiple geographies within her, that are in constant dialogue with one another. It is from this ever-multifaceted place that she looks out upon the Black Atlantic—not as an external subject of study, but as a space she inhabits and continues to learn to interpret.

Her long-term projects all proceed from the same gesture, starting with a fragmented : collective narrative of African descent women, vernacular architecture, and spiritual memories of the diaspora. Then, she reconstructs its fragments through images, text, and montage.

Since 2022, the masonn collective has been expanding its research to a new scale: by exploring vernacular architecture and mystical realism across various Black geocultural regions, it seeks to reveal cultural continuities that are often considered disparate, and to envision their potential for innovation.

In practice, collage occupies a place that is as much methodological as it is aesthetic: it is an act of reconstruction that rejects linearity, embracing cutting and reassembly as forms of truth about how diasporic identities are constructed—through sedimentation, borrowing, and reinvention. Photography and performance, for their part, explore the body as a site of living memory, while poetic writing opens up spaces for projection and care within the image.

A doctoral student at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, she is pursuing this artistic research through a dissertation focused on “faire-kaz” in the Black Atlantic, which explores the intersections of art, economics, and diasporic utopias. This dual role—as both practitioner and researcher—informs a research-creation methodology in which fieldwork, archival research, and studio practice constantly feed into one another.

Ultimately, what Wendie Zahibo seeks is to transform her artwork into a place of reconstruction, a space where the scattered narratives of the Black Atlantic can come together, respond to one another, and open the way to new forms of communal life.