Reframing Icarus through Black cosmology, diasporic memory, and the spiritual labour of becoming
Fahamu Pecou, ‘Icarus’, Montresso Art Foundation. Photographer: Mourad Boulhana
In his exhibition at the Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakech, Fahamu Pecou revisits the myth of Icarus through Afrocentric and diasporic frameworks of flight, return, and recognition. Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, and the silent short film Too, Fly, the works trace a cyclical journey shaped by folklore, ancestral knowledge, and lived Black experience. Here, flight is released from its familiar moral warning and reimagined as a practice of remembrance and self-knowing, an ongoing process of learning to trust one’s own capacity for ascent. The artist speaks to Brendon Bell-Roberts about the exhibition.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: The myth of Icarus is often read as a warning against ambition. Why was it important for you to reframe this story through an Afrocentric lens, and what new meanings does flight take on as a result?
Fahamu Pecou: I’ve long been fascinated by the story of Icarus. Still, the reframing crystallised after encountering a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live forever believing it is inadequate. That idea struck me deeply because Black Americans—especially Black boys—are routinely measured against ideals that are fundamentally anti-Black. The standard itself guarantees failure.
When failure is baked into the metric, anxiety becomes structural. Some conform and shrink. Others retreat into apathy.
Reframing Icarus through an Afrocentric lens is, for me, an act of refusal. It rejects the premise that the sun was the problem. Instead, it questions the sky we were told to aspire toward. In this rendering, failure is not catastrophe—it is revelation. When we stop chasing an ambition designed to exclude us, we gain the freedom to define flight on our own terms. Flight becomes less about proximity to power and more about alignment with purpose. It becomes a practice of self-recognition rather than self-destruction.
Fahamu Pecou, Aerodynamics, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 244 x 152cm. Courtesy of the artist and Montresso Art Foundation.
You describe Icarus as a meditation on becoming rather than falling. How does this shift speak to your broader exploration of Black self-recognition and imagined possibility?
The dominant social order has positioned Blackness as a perpetual other for generations. Colonial hierarchies linger in both visible and invisible ways—shaping access, imagination, and even the contours of desire.
My work has consistently sought new modalities for Black being—ways of inhabiting identity that are expansive rather than reactive. Approaching Icarus as a beginning rather than an ending reorients the narrative arc. Falling is no longer failure; it is transition.
To become is to shed imposed definitions. It is to move through rupture toward recognition. In that sense, Icarus becomes a study in reorientation—away from surveillance and toward interiority, away from spectacle and toward sovereignty. It proposes that what appears as descent may in fact be an initiation into deeper self-knowledge.
Fahamu Pecou, ‘Icarus’, Montresso Art Foundation. Photographer: Mourad Boulhana
Flight carries deep resonance in African diasporic histories, from folklore to literature. How did works like Song of Solomon and The People Could Fly inform the spiritual and conceptual grounding of this exhibition?
The allegory of flight reverberates across cultures, but within the African diaspora, it holds particular spiritual gravity. Winged figures are often imagined as divine intermediaries—moving between realms and collapsing the distance between earth and spirit. In Song of Solomon, flight is both escape and inheritance. It is burden and possibility intertwined. Morrison situates flight within memory—suggesting that to rise is also to remember.
Similarly, The People Could Fly imagines flight as an ancestral capacity—a latent power carried in the body even under enslavement. That folklore refuses the logic of captivity. It insists that transcendence was never fully extinguished.
These works grounded the exhibition spiritually. They helped situate flight not as reckless ambition but as ancestral technology—an embodied archive of survival, refusal, and return.
Fahamu Pecou, Atelier Jardin Rouge. Photographer: Mourad Boulhana
Your Grav•I•ty series addressed how Black boys are misread and constrained by stereotypes. How does Icarus move that conversation from social weight toward spiritual ascent?
Grav•I•ty interrogated the density of misrecognition, the way stereotype presses down on Black boys before they can name themselves. It examined how perception becomes a kind of force field. Icarus shifts that energy. Rather than remaining in the architecture of constraint, it imagines reclamation. The work no longer centres the weight imposed from outside but the lift generated from within.
This is not a denial of trauma. It is a refusal to let trauma define the horizon. Spiritual ascent, in this context, is not escapism. It is self-authorship.
The Kongo dikenga shapes the exhibition’s cyclical movement through life, death, and return. How did this cosmology influence the structure and pacing of Too, Fly?
The Kongo cosmogram presents time as cyclical rather than linear; birth, life, death, and rebirth exist in a dynamic relationship. That framework profoundly shaped Too, Fly.
I approached the film through non-linear storytelling. Scenes echo rather than resolve. Characters embody states rather than fixed identities. What appears to conclude re-emerges transformed.
Within this cosmology, endings are not terminal. They are thresholds. The pacing invites viewers to sit within transition rather than rush toward closure. It privileges rhythm over plot, recurrence over climax.
Fahamu Pecou, Sky Fall, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 122cm. Courtesy of the artist and Montresso Art Foundation.
You describe certain recurring forms as afrotropes. What does the Air Jordan 1 represent within this symbolic vocabulary of aspiration, burden, and transcendence?
The Air Jordan 1 has become more than footwear. It operates as a cultural relic, charged with mythology around elevation, ambition, and spectacle.
Within my vocabulary, it functions almost as nkisi, an object animated by collective belief. It holds aspiration and burden simultaneously. It references commerce and transcendence in the same breath.
The sneaker becomes an emblem of flight rooted in the everyday. It asks what it means to seek elevation within systems that commodify Black excellence even as they constrain it.
Fahamu Pecou, ‘Icarus’, Montresso Art Foundation. Photographer: Mourad Boulhana
Elements such as feathers, mirrors, masks, and water function as thresholds throughout the work. What kinds of crossings do these symbols invite the viewer to consider?
These materials operate as portals. Feathers suggest lift but also fragility. Mirrors demand confrontation with self-recognition rather than projection. Masks negotiate visibility and interiority.
Water carries memory, transition, and return.
Together, they invite crossings between imposed identity and chosen identity, between historical wound and spiritual continuity, between spectacle and ritual.
Projecting Too, Fly onto water transforms the film into a living surface. How does this choice reinforce your emphasis on ritual, slowness, and recognition over caution or spectacle?
Water is a symbol of passage. There is a proverb that describes water as the medium through which we enter the world, and the tears shed by our loved ones at our passing as the river that carries us back to essence.
Projecting the film onto water renders it shifting, breathing, alive. The image cannot be fixed. It resists spectacle. It demands presence.
In this context, flight is not an act of reckless ascent. It is ritual immersion. Recognition happens not in the blaze of the sun but in the reflective surface of water—where descent and return meet.
The exhibition at the Montresso Foundation, Marrakech, Morocco, closes on 21 March 2026. For more information, please visit Montresso Foundation.
