At Fondation H, the French-Beninese artist reclaims colonial imagery and weaves dialogue across continents, histories and spiritual worlds
Roméo Mivekannin, D’après Madagascar – Femme Hova en deuil, 2025. Acrylics and elixir bath on canvas, 204 x 145cm. © Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
With ‘Correspondances’, Roméo Mivekannin transforms the upper floor of Fondation H in Antananarivo into a space of echoes, repair and resistance. The exhibition brings the French-Beninese artist into dialogue with Malagasy history and cultural memory. At its centre are colonial postcards, objects once loaded with ideology and intimacy, that Mivekannin reappropriates through textile painting and collaborative craft. In one series, sheets sewn and embroidered by Malagasy women become fragile but powerful sites of care, healing and remembrance. In another, monumental metal altars created with local artisans place Vodou cosmology in conversation with Malagasy funerary traditions. The notion of “correspondance” expands here: between France, Benin and Madagascar, between archives and contemporary creation, between loss and resilience. In this interview, Mivekannin reflects on working with Malagasy craftspeople, navigating spiritual legacies, and transforming colonial images into acts of resistance, visibility and shared memory.
Stephan Rheeder: Your exhibition ‘Correspondances’ is deeply rooted in the Malagasy context. How have Madagascar’s history, territory, and culture transformed or enriched your practice for this project?
Roméo Mivekannin: My projects are always conceived contextually. During my visit to Tana, I met many people, including artisans, historians, writers, and holders of spiritual knowledge, who shared their lives and stories with me. These encounters changed my perspective. It is the encounter with the other that changes things within us. We cannot approach this exhibition without considering Edouard Glissant’s concept of the archipelago—how we create something by drawing strength from the diversity of different perspectives. This experience is a beautiful example of this. Madagascar itself lies at the crossroads of continents and enriches the world with its diversity.
Roméo Mivekannin, D’après une carte postale de Madagascar, 2025. Acrylics and elixir bath on canvas, 207 x 131cm. © Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
The title ‘Correspondances’ evokes echoes, exchanges, and also absences. How do you interpret this notion in relation to your works presented at the Fondation H?
The notion of correspondence, of echo, immediately brings to mind Baudelaire’s lines:
“Like long echoes which merge from afar
In a dark and deep unity
Vast as the night and as the clarity
The scents, the colours and the sounds respond to each other.”
There is a form of melancholy that particularly attracts me. The correspondence here is a thread of Ariadne that takes me everywhere, from Cotonou to Paris, from Paris to Tana; it is an invisible thread that takes me into the peril of exile and displacement. It is this peril also that forces me to put myself in my paintings, to find my place, the one I have chosen and not the one assigned to me by others. The absence of this correspondence is the missing part, the part of the invisible, because there are many things that we do not see and do not hear.
Colonial postcards occupy a central place in your work. How does their reappropriation become, for you, an act of resistance and reparation?
The colonial postcard is one chapter of a much broader research. The reappropriation of images from the past, from archives, from colonial iconography, is indeed an act of resistance, repair, and transformation. These canvases, made from sewn sheets, are a way for me to reconstruct and write my history. The act of sewing refers to the question of care. Sewing again is a way to heal inner wounds, which are intimately, infinitely connected to family wounds or the wounds of Black people who have been made invisible by history. I’m not really trying to talk about postcards, but to tell the story of the representation of women, particularly the representation of Black women, and how their perception in the colonial world and in Europe has shaped our view to this day. At the time, Europe was convinced it was carrying out a civilising mission in Africa. What remains of all that today?
Roméo Mivekannin, Sans Titre, 2021. Acrylic and elixir bath on free canvas, 204 x 136cm. © Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
You collaborated with Malagasy embroiderers and metalworkers. How did their techniques and expertise influence the final works?
Malagasy artisans and their exceptional know-how have allowed the works to be enhanced with a depth that could not have been created anywhere else but in Madagascar. By bringing together embroiderers and ironworkers, the works circulate from hand to hand, taking on what these artisans have to offer, their experience, their depth.
In this project, you engage in a dialogue between Vodun cosmology and Malagasy funerary traditions. How do you navigate between these spiritual universes?
By considering what constitutes the essence of the voodoo tradition: Where are we? Where do we come from? Who are we? These are questions that people in Madagascar also really ask themselves. There is a relationship between ancestors and death that responds to each other.
Roméo Mivekannin, D’aprés Madagascar, Coiffures de femmes Vezo, 2025. Acrylics and elixir bath on canvas 183 x 121cm. © Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
Your exchange with the exhibition curator, Hobisoa Raininoro, has been essential. How did her perspective shape the development of ‘Correspondances ‘?
It’s a process that she nurtured and that allowed the project to blossom. Every discussion enriches the process with meaning, like a musical score that must be interpreted by members of the same orchestra.
Fondation H is known for promoting intercultural exchanges in Madagascar. What does it mean to you to present ‘Correspondances’ there rather than in France or Benin?
Fondation H is a place that generates cooperation between diverse perspectives; it is a place that serves as a receptacle for all these energies that discuss together, once again in the manner of Edouard Glissant’s archipelago.
Roméo Mivekannin, Sans Titre, 2021. Acrylic and elixir bath on free canvas, 192 x 130cm. © Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
Looking back on the process, what would you like the public in Antananarivo – and beyond – to take away from this exhibition?
Everything that touches its goal is missed. I like to leave room for the unexpected, the uncontrollable. If the exhibition becomes a place of exchange, that’s already great. I don’t necessarily set expectations for the audience.
‘Correspondances’ by Roméo Mivekannin runs from 2 October 2025 to 21 March 2026 at Fondation H, Antananarivo.
