Wendie Zahibo

B. 1991 - Guadeloupe

Wendie Zahibo is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher (poet, photographer, performer and collage artist) living and working between Guadeloupe and mainland France. Born into a multicultural family with roots in Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic, she draws on these heritages to question the construction of identities within the Black Atlantic.

A graduate of Harrington College of Design in Chicago (2014) and holder of a master's degree in Art and International Creation from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2025), she is currently a doctoral candidate there, working on a thesis titled "Faire-kaz: Art and Diasporic Utopias in the Black Atlantic between 2009 and 2029".

In 2015, she launched Reines Des Temps Modernes, a long term exploration of Black female representations, deepened in 2020 with Corsé de cuirs (Neg Mawons editions). She also co founded Bazaart, an association awarded the MansaLab program (2025).

Since 2022, she has developed masonn, a transnational, transmedia project exploring vernacular architecture and mystic realism in the Black Atlantic, exhibited in South Korea, Brazil, France, Ivory Coast and Senegal. A laureate of the ONDES 2024 program and former resident at the Cité internationale des Arts, she was selected among the 23 laureates of the 2025 Festival Circulation(s), with ongoing residencies and exhibitions across Côte d'Ivoire, Brazil and Guyane. She also leads collage and sensitive-mapping workshops, notably with CENTQUATRE PARIS.


ARTIST STATEMENT

Wendie Zahibo's work is rooted in theoretical, visual, and performative research on African-Caribbean and diasporic identities. Through photography, collage, poetry, and installation, she maps an archipelagic cartography of resistant memories, radical archives, and Black Atlantic geographies.


Born into a multicultural family with African roots (Ivorian and Central African) and Caribbean branches (Guadeloupe), she draws on African-Caribbean cosmogonies and the contemporary Afro-diasporic experience to examine the relationships between the visible and the invisible, between inhabited architecture and the narratives that run through it. Her spatialized collages transform photography into a pliable medium: archival images cut apart and recomposed, setting abstract forms in dialogue with island geographies.

Since 2022, this practice has crystallized in masonn, a transnational and transmedia project rooted in vernacular architecture and mystical realism within the Black Atlantic. Drawing on the work of architect Jack Berthelot, particularly Kaz antiyé jan moun ka rété, the project explores the ways of inhabiting space specific to Afro-descendant communities as forms of cultural resistance and living continuity. Engaging with the tools of critical narrativity and dissident fiction, Wendie Zahibo envisions the possibilities of a future born from emancipatory narratives and diasporic utopias.