Zoé Samudzi (US, 1992)
Residency period: May-July 2026
I came to La Becque to work on my artistic research, Can the African Steal?. To try to take useful advantage of my environment and materials at my disposal, I attempted a proof of concept: an inaugural project in relation to a local institution (Photo Elysée in Lausanne). Even though I’d initially intended to create a project that was specifically about Switzerland, I ended up creating a little web of implication that connected the Swiss archive — both the museum itself and broader Swiss participation in ethnographic photography and the colonial ventures of other European nation-states — to the Belgian Congo, the geography depicted in the archival images I worked with.
The albums contained symbols and placenames that allowed me to map out some of the corporate and governance infrastructure in the Belgian Congo and the preceding Congo Free State. Focusing on the Katanga Province, the center of mining activity, what eventually emerged was a transnational analytic of the materiality of the atomic bomb: from the extraction of uranium ore from the Shinkolobwe mine in southern Katanga to Union Minière’s collaboration with the Manhattan Project to the bomb’s deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the racialized spectrality conjoining these geographies.
From this research and first short lecture, The Bomb in/and/out of the Archive is something I intend to extend further and in collaboration with others per the intention of Can the African Steal? — Zoé Samudzi
Zoé Samudzi is an American writer and researcher based in Columbus. She is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University and a Global Blackness Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies.
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.
Photos Matthieu Croizier and Aurélien Haslebacher