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. The practice of A/r/tography—with its three interwoven activities of art-making, research, and teaching—creates a métissage that enables art to extend into the rhizomatic fabric of the world. Métissage exists in the borderlands, where cultures conflict, contest, and reconstitute one another, erasing borders and barriers (Rita Irwin 2023). A/r/tography, as a métissage of knowing, doing, and making, offers a dynamic interdisciplinary method to explore the role of art and the artist through relationships and dialogue.

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, research, community art and social change. Teaching is also learning as we engage creatively with self and others, caring and re-imagining together.

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 explorative artworks that serve as inspirational seeds for collective artistic experiments of co-creation, co-inquiry, dialogues and exchanges. The aim of the project, as it unfolds, is to invite a multicultural community from the Global North and Global South to join experimental artistic laboratories—online or in person— and create art together as a form of dialogue and exchange. The artistic process centers on the practice of deconstruction and hybridization through the modalities of collage, assemblage, and poetic storytelling. The experimental laboratories wish to spark refreshing forms of expression, relationships and connections, visiting themes of exchange and gift versus exploitation and appropriation. In this container, viewers and creators are invited to question perspectives and perceptions —both individually and collectively—and engage in meaningful inquiry through artistic expression.

ARTISTIC CONCEPT
Fabric and textiles are powerful metaphors for the woven processes of life itself and the intricate, entangled kinship we share with the living world. We exist within a complex “relational continuum” (Bayo Akomolafé, 2024) that challenges the linear thinking of cause and effect, control, and productivity prevalent in contemporary society. Art offers a space to explore this complexity from its peripheries, free from the pressures of achieving results or solutions. In the ON WAX project, the symbolic use of textiles establishes a metaphorical woven backdrop for this research and its artistic experiments, bridging artistic practice with a co-inquiry into our interconnectedness.

While traditional weaving patterns represent a universal language shared by many Indigenous communities worldwide, African Wax prints uniquely embody a history of cultural hybridization shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and globalization.The project symbolically deconstructs traditional ancestral weaving patterns and African Wax print designs, transforming them into reconstructed narratives that weave together themes of relationality. By disassembling these cultural motifs and reimagining them in new forms, the creative process mirrors the entangled nature of our shared histories and interrelations.

ARTISTIC FRAME & SEMANTIC OF ATTRACTORS
For the ON WAX project, I selected a range of African Wax motifs from various designs, periods, and origins, drawing from Anne Grosfilley’s extensive anthropological research and anthologies of Wax prints (2017). The chosen motifs are primarily figurative, depicting humans, animals, and manmade objects. To me, these motifs embody the intricate web of relationships that connect us—to each other, to the natural world, and to the cultural artifacts we create. Each motif can invite us into layers of meaning and cultural memory, engaging our imagination through symbolic language, metaphors and storytelling. The selection sparked my desire to reflect in a poetic way on the complex relationality that defines our shared existence. These visual and conceptual elements serve as starting points for artistic experimentation and inquiry.

• Selected patterns from traditional weaving
• Selected motifs from African Wax designs
• Maps of Africa & the world found in a french atlas from 1850 forgotten in the attic of my family house in France
• A limited colour palette: BLACK WHITE / RED EARTH

This framework provides the symbolic and material elements from which the project draws, weaving together personal history, cultural artifacts, and shared narratives into the artistic exploration.

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. By exposing hidden biases, contradictions, and hierarchies embedded in cultural and artistic norms, deconstruction invites fresh interpretations and perspectives. In art, it 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. In my own art practice and teaching, deconstruction is a potent creative catalyst that not only disrupts the habitual but also initiates a profound gestalt shift 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. As a trained gestalt art therapist, I am fascinated by how 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 experimentation with the creative process I remain in awe of how the hands themselves, the body, these parts of us that are not directly conscious, can access a different kind of knowing when we embrace the not-knowing in art-making. This knowing, which emerges from deeper parts of ourselves, resonates with the concept of poiesis—“knowing through making”—central to expressive arts. This is the kind of knowing we will look for as we explore the ON WAX themes of co-inquiry in the collective experiments. Participants willing to explore questions of creative hybridization versus exploitative appropriation will be invited to directly experience hands-on artistic deconstruction and hybridization to disturb and expand their perceptions, while opening up to multiple perspectives. They will create and share collages, assemblages, poems, and stories, drawing from the common library of visual elements of the ON WAX project and incorporating their own personal imagery.

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 consider artistic expression as a gift to ourselves—a gift of renewal, joy, and vitality, a gift that expands our consciousness, and a gift of connection that nourishes those with whom we share it. This question of “Art as Gift” became one of the themes weaving itself into this multidirectional inquiry, calling forth other 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 make these questions present, 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 the idea of gift and exchange through the arts and make the impossible possible. Together, we will think with our hands, embrace the unknown, and share what emerges.