ON WAX ARTISTIC PROCESS
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.
FRAME OF THE ARTISTIC EXPLORATION
To guide the creative process, the ON WAX project is framed by a curated selection of aesthetic attractors—visual and conceptual elements that resonate with the themes of interconnection between humans, humans and non-humans, history and hybridity. These attractors 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.
SEMANTIC OF ATTRACTORS
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.
On the other hand, the technique of wax prints originated from Indonesian batik traditions. Copied and industrialized by Dutch and English colonizers, these textiles were introduced to the African market in the 19th century. Despite their foreign origins, they became integral to African identity, replacing traditional woven cloth while retaining cultural meaning. The designs merged iconography from Asia, Africa, and Europe and have evolved into symbols of beauty, status, and social messaging. Market women, such as the Nana Benz of Togo, shaped distribution, influenced designs, and even funded independence movements, highlighting wax prints’ socio-political impact.
African Wax prints embody an uncomfortable paradox: they form an incredibly rich and vibrant collection of designs created over more than a century, with an iconography deeply inspired by African culture, yet they have largely been manufactured outside Africa. They reflect both colonial exploitation and African cultural resilience. While appropriation is a creative force that generates culture, it also presupposes power dynamics and often implies exploitation. As Jens Balzer argues in “Ethics of Cultural Appropriation” (2023): “If culture is essentially appropriation, the question is not whether the assimilation of foreign cultural motifs is legitimate, but which forms of cultural appropriation are acceptable as respectful and not based on exploitation.” African wax prints became for me an opportunity to reflect artistically on these questions within today’s global complexities.
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.
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.
In many cultures black and white colour themes evokes the balance of opposing yet interdependent forces: masculine and feminine, acting and being, day and night, light and shadow. In African cosmologies, black and white are seen as complementary forces rather than opposites, embodying balance and harmony. This mirrors the concept of duality found in other cultural philosophies. Black is often associated with the earth, fertility, the unknown, and the spiritual world. It represents depth, mystery, and the origins of life. White, on the other hand, is linked to purity, light, clarity, and the physical world. It often symbolizes the realm of the living and is used in rituals for protection and purification. In Yoruba tradition, black and white are associated with Esu (or Eshu), a trickster god trickster messenger between heaven and earth representing the coexistence of opposites. The juxtaposition of black and white is also prevalent in African textiles, such as kente cloth and mud cloth, where the patterns often convey stories, cultural values, and social identities. These colour contrasts are integral to the visual language of African art, symbolizing unity and diversity.
This polarity also reflects a tension that extends into the historical and cultural dynamics of colonialism and global systems. Whiteness, constructed as “civilized,” aligns with notions of domination, production, and consumerism—systems that prioritize exploitation, growth, and anthropocentric worldviews. In contrast, blackness, often racialized and marginalized, can be connected to “indigenous” ways of being that emphasize balance, interdependence, and a deep connection to the land. In the binary thinking imposed by colonial histories, whiteness imposed itself as superior and “rational,” casting blackness as “primitive” and “irrational.” Yet the crises of today reveal the unsustainability of such hierarchies, pointing instead to the wisdom embedded in systems that value relationality, reciprocity, and non-anthropocentric understanding of life. As explained by Bayo Akomolafé, in our postcolonial time the concept of blackness and whiteness go beyond the colour of our skin.
The choice of red earth as a third color evokes our connection to the land, the planet, and the materiality that grounds human existence. Symbolizing the soil, the body of the earth, 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.
WAX PRINTS & TEXTILE INDUSTRY IN GHANA
After Ghana’s independence, efforts to establish a local textile industry led to the creation of factories producing wax prints. In 1966, the Ghana Textiles Printing Company (GTP) was launched, with the government holding a majority stake. Around the same time, Akosombo Textiles Limited (ATL) was established, later becoming part of the Cha Textiles Group from Hong Kong. Despite these initiatives, the industry did not achieve full autonomy in finance, design, and economic control. Today, the Ghanaian textile sector confronts new significant challenges due to the massive influx of second-hand clothing from the global North and the proliferation of inexpensive Chinese imitations of wax prints and synthetic fabrics. These factors have severely impacted local production, leading to a decline in the domestic textile industry and threatening the preservation of indigenous crafts and economic independence.
