Zoé Samudzi (US, 1992)
Residency period: May-July 2026
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.
At La Becque, Zoé Samudzi will develop the foundations of Can the African Steal?, a constellary project examining the relationship between the property regime as theft and the political economy of postcolonial Africa. Drawing on the work of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), the project explores resource extraction, the affects and materialities of debt, and the possibilities of restitution and reparations. Focusing on Switzerland’s entanglements with colonial economies and histories, Samudzi will work with photographic archives at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, using ethnographic images of African subjects and landscapes to investigate the connections between colonial land claims, financial and museal infrastructures, and European racial imaginaries.