Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo (known as Madame Zo) was a Malagasy artist whose subversion of the ancient lamba weaving tradition of Madagascar was rooted in a recognition of the vibrating presence of material objects, especially those wrested from their typical conditions of use, their codes. Hers was a weaving-as-channelling, tapping into the artist’s unconscious as much as into energies, ancestral memory fragments, and broken tongues. The materials she brought together—copper wire, silk, magnetic tape, plant matter, plastic refuse, glass shards, and bread—revealed the three-dimensionality of weaving, the leap from planar, if textured, textile into sculpture. Her confrontation with mortality, and its consolation in material traces, can be felt in the dynamic of narrative and abstraction, entropy and regeneration that imbues Zo’s works. And the lyrical eccentricity of her interests and output tends not towards dissonance, but to a sort of generative alchemy. The suggestion of material transformation is evident in a work like Santé de fer (2020), its primary elements being copper and herbs. That both are seen as vehicles for transmission—one scientific and energetic, the other medicinal and perhaps folkish—is not a contradiction for Zo, but rather invites a conversation between the inorganic and organic. In another work on view, Perdu dans la mer (2019), whose title translates as ‘lost at sea’, green thread, fabrics, and magnetic tape are fashioned into a vertical hanging; viewed horizontally, it calls to mind a flimsy raft. It is not difficult to see the inclusion of pieces of driftwood—a material which, having spent an untold time being jostled by waves, eventually finds itself again on land—as a metaphor for the precarity of migrant crossings in the seas of today.

Works in the exhibition:
Silence 1 (2013), magnetic tape, 315 × 143 cm
La Bague (2016), magnetic strips, grey thread, copper, 186 × 196 × 1 cm
Rayons de soleil (2017), grey thread, magnetic tape, sisal band, 217 × 190 cm
Untitled (2018), magnetic tape, copper wire, 270 × 195 cm
Monsieur (2020), grey thread, ties, grey cords, 16 mm film, 184 × 180 cm
Son coupé (2020), cut up white fabric, black foam cords, 200 × 195 cm
Untitled (2019), grey fabric, brown 16 mm film, white fabric, plastic, 272 × 193 cm
Untitled (date unknown), white fabric, mirror, silk cotton, 195 × 210 cm
Untitled (2019), black fabric, white fabric, rust-coloured raffia, 240 × 207 cm
Untitled (2018), copper wire, black ribbon, cotton-ecru blend, 200 × 106 cm
Untitled (date unknown), newspaper, purple ribbon, computer circuit, 157 × 203 cm
Perdu dans la mer (2019), black fabric, driftwood, magnetic tape, green thread, grey thread, 270 × 186 cm
Untitled (2019), green fabric, green thread, 266 × 172 cm
Untitled 10 (2019), fabric, 16 mm film, cotton yarn, 108 × 76 cm La tête du pays (2016), grey wire, copper, 210 × 186 cm
La Fortune (2016), copper wire, magnetic tape, green cloth, rope, white pipe, spool, jute wire, cloth tape, plastic tape, green strap, fine sisal rope, elongated metal parts, rounded metal parts, wild silk wire, twigs, 175 × 180 cm
Mediart (2015), newspaper, magnetic tape, 236 x 192 cm Courtesy of Collection Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar