Zoé Samudzi (US, 1992)
Residency period: May-July 2026
Zoé Samudzi is an American writer and researcher based in Providence. She is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, a Global Blackness Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and a curatorial research fellow in photography at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne.
Her writing, published in Artforum, Bookforum, Art in America, Architectural Review, The Funambulist, and others, examines the genealogies and political economies of race and materiality in aesthetic practices. She is also associate editor of Parapraxis Magazine and curator of forthcoming exhibitions at Torino Foto Festival and the Project Arts Centre in Dublin.
During her residency at La Becque, Zoé Samudzi will develop a project interrogating concepts of land, ownership, and restitution through the lens of African epistemologies. Taking seriously Indigenous conceptions of land as disruptions to capitalist extraction, she will reflect on European resistance to decolonial restitution and contemporary struggles for land reform. Framed by the provocation “can Africans steal?”, the project challenges ownership structures rooted in colonial theft. Drawing on the work of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), who minted a digital replica of a stolen statue to compel its return to the DRC, she will explore how acts of reappropriation can expose and subvert entrenched colonial logics.