Since the dawn of our civilisation we have engaged in art infused rituals to celebrate the cycles of life, conjure healing and pray the gods (Sally Atkins 2014). In Expressive arts we view the arts as our original language, to be claimed or reclaimed, and made accessible to all. Art becomes a gift to ourselves and our community, a space for inquiry and discovery, a space to explore thresholds and unknown territories, to dialogue with the living world around us, to connect, relate, and share with both humans and non-humans. It serves as a gateway to experience what Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) described as “living in the flesh of the world,” and immerse ourselves in the intricate phenomenology of the relational continuum in which we are embedded. 

In expressive art practice we embrace the creative process as a dance between not knowing and knowing, between getting lost and finding our way. Art making starts with the intuitive call of our aesthetic attractors /medium /artistic modalities, not knowing yet where they will lead us, trusting that as we attend diligently to the medium and embrace possible confusion and chaos, at some point coherence and meaning will emerge (William Kentridge 2024). In the ON WAX project the “attractors motifs” serve as a “contact zone” or starting point from which the project can spread “tentacularly” (Donna Haraway 2017) extending in different directions through exploratory art-making, philosophy, sociological and historical research, community art and social change.

Spanning across art, culture, history, philosophy, and evolution, the ON WAX research project seeks to ignite artistic explorations that address the entangled dynamics between global North and global South and our intricate relationships with the human and non-human world. Artistically the project started with the creation of personal explorative artworks that serve as inspirational seeds for further collective artistic experiments of co-creation, co-inquiry, dialogues and exchanges.

TEXTILE BACKDROP
Weaving patterns and the art of weaving reflect the fabric of life across human cultures throughout time and space. The loom itself can symbolize a space where polarities meet, with the intersection of the warp and weft serving as a universal metaphor for human existence. The vertical warp represents connections between past and future, earth and sky, body and spirit—symbolizing evolution. Meanwhile, the horizontal weft suggests our ties to the world around us: to others, to our communities, and to our fields of belonging, embodying the dynamics of giving and receiving in society. The tradition of weaving and wearing weaved cloth in West Africa is deeply rooted in the region’s culture, history, and social structures, representing identity, status, and symbolism. It functions both as an art form and as a medium of communication, connecting individuals with their communities, ancestors, and broader cultural heritage.

Other important attractors framing this project are maps of Africa and the world, sourced from a French atlas published in 1850—an artifact I discovered forgotten in the attic of my family home in France. These maps serve as powerful symbols of history, reflecting how colonial cartographies have shaped our world today. At the same time, they embody my own origins and positionality within the Global North, acknowledging the legacy of colonial exploitation and the ways in which histories of power, migration, and cultural entanglement continue to unfold. Through artistic deconstruction and recomposition, these maps will become sites of inquiry, opening spaces to reimagine relationships between past and present, north and south, self and other, memory and transformation.

The choice of a limited color palette evokes a triangular dynamic between “whiteness,” “blackness,” and the earthy land we depend on. In the binary thinking imposed by colonial histories, whiteness has been positioned as superior and “rational,” while blackness has been cast as “primitive” and “irrational.” Today’s crises reveal the unsustainability of such hierarchies and polarisation, pointing instead towards non-anthropocentric wisdoms that embrace the earth itself and the system of relationality and reciprocity of which we are all a part. As Bruno Latour argues “How could we deem ‘realistic’ a project of modernization that has ‘forgotten’ for two centuries to anticipate the reactions of the terraqueous globe to human actions? How could we accept as “objective’ economic theories that are incapable of integrating into their calculations the scarcity of resources whose exhaustion it had been their mission to predict?” (2019)

The red earth as a third color stands for our connection to the land, the planet, and the materiality that grounds human existence. Representing the soil and the life it sustains, red earth resonates with indigenous traditions that view the land as a living entity, inseparable from identity, culture, and survival. This symbolism aligns with the philosophical current of new materialism, which rejects the binary opposition between nature and culture, subject and object, and instead embraces the dynamic interplay of matter, energy, and agency. New materialism emphasizes that the world is not composed of inert, passive substances shaped solely by human will; instead, matter itself is vibrant, alive with potential, and co-constitutive of human and non-human worlds.

CREATIVE PROCESS
The art making process began with the creation of an art journal of the project, combining images, fabric, and texts into collaged compositions. This served as a way to freely explore and observe the emerging dialogue between aesthetic attractors and how they opened research questions. The journal was a perfect portable art form and traveling companion, allowing me to document my exploration while in Ghana and throughout the various phases of the project. The studio journal is one of the tools we use in my teaching program to support personal art practice. Many ideas take root in the free form and playfulness of the art journal to be later developed into more elaborate artworks. 

After returning from Ghana to my studio, I started extracting and digitally manipulating collected materials such as wax print motifs, African weaving patterns, and the 1850s maps. I reworked and transformed these visual elements to create a “library” of raw material for experimentation. By deconstructing these collected elements and mixing them with other materials, I composed and reconstructed new visual narratives in the form of analog, digital, and video collages, assemblages, weavings, and patchworks.  The resulting visual compositions became seeds for a writing process, where research and stories further deepened the dialogue between imagery and meaning.  

As I engaged in this process and observed the works taking shape, key themes of cultural appropriation versus reciprocity, exploitation versus exchange or gift, progress and consumerism, cultural identity and hybridization, multiplicity and universality, emerged. These questions were calling for a collective artistic exploration and inquiry, informed by diverse cultural perspectives shaped by factors such as gender, race, Africans and Pan-African origins.

HYBRIDIZATION IN ART AND CULTURE
Heading to Ghana with the aim of exploring processes of hybridization in arts and crafts led me to investigate the concept of cultural hybridization, its history, and its meaning in postcolonialist context. Concepts of hybridity and creolization are very central to the reflection of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Edouard Glissant. The Indian literary theorist and scholar Homi K. Bhabha adapted the term hybridity to examine the identities and subjectivities formed within the colonial master/subject relationship. His terminology draws from postmodernist ideas, particularly Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction.  Edward Said (1935–2003), a philosopher of Palestinian origin, developed the concept of orientalism and exoticism to reveal colonial attitudes that exoticize and diminish the cultural “other,” seen as subaltern. Exoticism has long been embedded in colonial literature and discourse to mock or undermine indigenous cultures. It remains visible in contemporary Western culture, where individuals and groups operating from a position of white privilege often romanticize and appropriate rituals, objects, and artifacts belonging to exploited native cultures—frequently with little or no regard for the people themselves. Edouard Glissant (1928–2011), a French writer, poet, and philosopher from Martinique, further enriched this discussion by introducing the term rhizomatic cultures in his works “Caribbean Discourse” and “Poetics of Relation”. Borrowing the concept from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Glissant proposed that cultures are like rhizomes: horizontal, underground networks that defy hierarchies. For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome represents a postmodern way of thinking, no longer striving for unity and homogeneity but celebrating heterogeneity, plurality, and the interconnectedness of everything. 

While reflecting on the mixed media and hybrid artistic practices in contemporary global culture, the question of cultural appropriation inevitably arises. Historically, all cultures have evolved through some forms of appropriation from other cultures, creation and evolution are simply inconceivable without appropriations. One of the most striking examples of “créolisation” is the profound and far-reaching African influence on the evolution of music composition worldwide, which has shaped countless genres of musical expression. Africa’s diverse rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic traditions have traveled across the globe through the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, migration, and cultural exchange. In music and in art hybridization, deconstruction and recombination of materials, motifs, traditions and ideas fuel creativity. Today’s digital media and internet offer a 24/7 global library of images, sounds, and cultural artifacts available to anyone seeking creative inspiration, paving the way for multiple forms of artistic hybridity to emerge. As discussed by Susan Scafidi in “Who Owns Culture?” (2005), this constant availability “enables us to draw from virtually all forms of cultural expressions, expanding artistic, personal, and existential possibilities”. Creation, cultural dynamics, and development have become inseparable from appropriation in a world characterized by the globalization of communication and cultural production. However, “white supremacy” and modernity have also generated countless forms of exploitative appropriations, exemplified by the violent history of colonialism and capitalism. African wax prints became, for me, an opportunity to “stay with the trouble” and explore through artistic expression—both personally and collectively—what forms of cultural appropriation and exchange could not only be respectful of others’ cultures and artifacts, but also spark and celebrate our ever-evolving multiplicity and diversity within today’s global complexities.

DECONSTRUCTION AND THE EDGE OF FAMILIARITY
Deconstruction, a critical approach to literary analysis developed by Jacques Derrida, questions fixed meanings, stable identities, and universal truths, advocating instead for fluidity, multiplicity, and the contingency of meaning. Deconstruction seeks to dismantle binary oppositions by revealing their mutual dependence and internal instability. In doing so, it breaks down embedded power dynamics and hierarchies. Deconstruction has played a central role in both feminist and postcolonial thought, exposing the hidden biases within dominant discourses—such as the civilised/primitive or male/female binaries—that uphold patriarchal and colonial structures. By exposing hidden biases, contradictions, and hierarchies embedded in cultural and artistic norms, deconstruction invites fresh interpretations and perspectives.

In art, deconstruction also involves breaking down established structures, forms, and narratives to question coherence and stability. Emerging historically through collage, accident, and chance in the works of surrealist and modernist artists, deconstruction has consistently generated new artistic perspectives, shaping contemporary art as we now know it. 

There is no direct evidence that Derrida was influenced by collage, but their parallel emergence in the 20th century marks a shared cultural impulse. Collage may be seen as a precursor to deconstruction—both aesthetically and philosophically—as it opens up cracks in fixed categories, catalyzing new ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction shares deep affinities with the logic of collage. Both practices resist unity, celebrate multiplicity, and reveal hidden structures of meaning through fragmentation of the pre-constructed, unexpected juxtapositions, and the emergence of différance. 

Collage began as a revolutionary rupture in the flat plane of painting and has since infiltrated every major artistic evolution of the 20th and 21st centuries. Its logic—disruption, layering, recontextualization—has proven not only an aesthetic tool but also a conceptual method. From early Cubism and surrealism to installation, performance, digital art and hybrid practices, collage has served as a persistent agent of deconstruction, fertilizing the ground of postmodern contemporary art. As both artistic method and philosophical gesture, collage challenges the viewer, the maker, and the medium. It opens gaps in perception and habit, allowing new configurations to emerge. It is not simply a technique—it is a way of thinking in fragments and in movement, an epistemology of rupture, and a vision of constant becoming.

In my art practice and teaching, deconstruction emerged as a potent creative catalyst that not only disrupts the habitual but also initiates profound gestalt shifts in perception. By breaking down the fixity of how the brain sees a composition and reconfiguring the relationship between background and foreground, deconstruction liberates us to see anew. This practice activates shifts in our perceptual frameworks, enabling us to experiment with fresh ways of seeing and being. While disturbing our perceptions, deconstruction allows us to explore the edges of familiarity and enter uncharted territories.

Through my years of experimenting with the creative process, I remain in awe of how the body, the hands -those parts of us not directly governed by conscious thought- can access a different kind of knowing when we allow ourselves to embrace not-knowing in art-making. This intuitive knowledge, which arises from deeper layers of our being, aligns with the concept of poiesis—“knowing through making”—a principle central to expressive arts. It is this kind of knowing that we will seek as we engage in the ON WAX collective experiments of co-inquiry.

ART AS GIFT
During my stay in Ghana, I had the chance to visit the blaxTARLINES artists’ collective at the University of Kumasi and meet their charismatic leader, the artist-intellectual, poet, mathematician, and teacher Karî’kachä seid’ou. Together with a team of artist-teachers, he is the initiator and architect of the “Emancipatory Art Teaching Project,” which transformed the fine art curriculum of the Department of Painting and Sculpture in Kumasi at the turn of the century. One of Karî’kachä seid’ou’s artistic propositions is the search for new forms of “Art as Gift,” free from capitalist and institutional constraints. He invites artists and students to explore ways to “make the impossible possible.” Karî’kachä seid’ou has “transformed his own art practice from making art into making artists, renouncing all kinds of capitalist ownership over his art. He sees himself as a vanishing mediator, a node in the complex network of effects that the pedagogic code can instantiate. The effects of his gift come back to overwhelm him as both pedagogue and learner” (African Arts, 2021).  

This proposition triggered many questions that have been present throughout my lifelong artistic journey. Committing to an artistic voice free from capitalist and institutional control is an economic challenge for most contemporary artists around the world today. Lewis Hyde, in his book “The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World” (1983), discusses the origin of artistic inspiration and describes the position of the artist in this way: “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. A work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” For Hyde, the gift is the inspiration we receive as artists and the necessity to share our creations as gifts with our communities.  

In expressive arts, we view artistic expression as a gift to ourselves—a source of renewal, joy, and vitality; a means of expanding consciousness; and a gesture of connection that nourishes those with whom we share it. The question of “Art as Gift” has become one of the thread weaving through this multidirectional inquiry. The ON WAX project explores the tension between artistic gift exchange and artistic ownership, intentionally avoiding exploitative or market-driven dynamics. Any profits from the project are redirected to the Nubuke Foundation in Ghana, as donations supporting their program for women weavers in the northern region—where craft and tradition struggle to survive economically.

This theme of gift exchanges also naturally calls forth other larger questions such as: What is a fair sharing of resources on a global scale? How could a gift society function in today’s world? While the endemic debts of African countries seem to be perpetuated by renewed forms of neocolonialism, how can we repair the dynamics of exchange between the global north and the global south? 

Setting aside the idea of finding answers, how can an artistic process help us presence this questions, shift perspectives, and enlarge our scope sideways? How can I—and how can we as a collective—experiment with “Art as Gift”? How can we make the impossible possible? The collective art laboratories will be an invitation to presence these questions and witness the constellation of our emergent creations.