‘Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the norm.’ Friedrich Nietzsche’s withering insight is apt when we consider the global pandemic of fanaticism. The German philosopher distrusted group-think, and rightly so. So did the Malagasy artist, Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo, also known as Madame Zo. Her passing in July 2020, at 64, at the start of the Covid pandemic, proved an immense loss, as she was on the cusp of worldwide recognition. Her first retrospective, which ran for ten months between 2023 and 2024, drew over 110000 visitors. It is the immensity of the artist’s local popularity and the seismic global impact that still awaited her, that proves pivotal. While I missed the show by weeks, thanks to Soanala Andrianarison I was given access to the archive, which comprises a hundred works. Immediately, it is the eccentricity of the amalgamated elements in the weave that strikes one, the works’ compelling incongruity, its comparative rarity despite the immense global impact of textiles on the art world today – the pensive estranging density of the artist’s heart and mind, the pathos that clings like a burr in knowing just how close she was to a wider acclaim, which she was truly convinced of, but denied her. That is until the Fondation H blockbuster show, which was also the institution’s inaugural event.
If Madame Zo’s institutionality and potential globality are critical, so is her radical eccentricity. Wary of the stranglehold of tradition and custom, preoccupied with her own path, she would reign posthumously as the most daring contemporary Malagasy artist. For doubtless she stands apart, her allure based on her subversion of an ancient tradition of weaving – Lamba – in which woven cloth, as sacrament, completes the cycle of life and death. If she questioned this cycle, it is because dissonance compelled her more, because life was better understood solitarily. As another great renegade, Simone de Beauvoir, noted, ‘Nothing in the world – no word, no oath, no companionship, however intimate – can fully bridge the separation of one existence from another. There is always a crack, if not an abyss.’
It is this crack, this abyss, in the weave of life and art that compelled Madame Zo to produce her anomalous life-work. Comprising compressed newsprint, copper wire, shards of mica, magnetic tape, bread, silk, dried vetiver roots, fandrotrarana reeds, computer innards, plastic waste, and a host of other eclectic materials, Madame Zo’s art stands firmly in a radical tradition of Arte Povera or Art de la Recup, and its distinctively African detournement. For what fascinated and compelled the artist was the visceral and material undoing of any conditional clause or established convention. Hers, notes Alya Sebti, are ‘improbable weavings’, while for the co-curator of the Madame Zo exhibition in 2023, Berenice Saliou, the artist’s abstract experimental works leap ‘beyond the limited loom to embrace monumentality and entropy.’ This compound of conflicting drives reveals the core tension in the artist and the making, between a desire for longevity and its absurdity. It recalls the bracing vision of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, in which he challenges hubris – monumentality – and reminds us of inevitable decay – entropy.
For Saliou, Madame Zo’s ‘huge body of work’, ‘largely unknown beyond Madagascar’, is ‘inspired as much by the world’s chaos as by the vibrations of energy’. As such, it is as critical as it is intuitive, as material as it is elemental, as wary of power as it is haunted by the strength of powerlessness. For as Saliou compellingly concludes, when looking at and entering a work by Madame Zo, ‘all may well slip into an unknown dimension: a sort of black hole which, far from being empty, would actually be a place with potentialities.’ If this insight is seismically significant, it is because Saliou has understood the vitality of the fathomless, the skewed, crazed, dissonance built into the weave. Noting the etymological link between text and textile, Saliou alerts us to Madame Zo’s art as a haunted tonguing. This, however, does not suppose that her abstractions speak some indelible truth. On the contrary, as fellow curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung notes, ‘Sometimes the spaces that speak the least tell us the most.’
Madame Zo’s quiet is widely acknowledged. For her art was no shouting match. Rather, her grasp was psychosomatic and physiological – stemming from an acutely dissociative yet drastically connected inner world. Rina Ralay-Ranaivo quotes the following vision by Madame Zo – ‘I dream of weaving / the hands of the living … / and even if they were dead / I would weave their bodies.’ Haunted, macabre, it is a vision that speaks of worlds beyond the objectifiable, of matter in an endlessly changing cycle in which life and death are one and both finally immaterial. By ensnaring her weave about the living and the dead, Madame Zo announces the funereal nature of art-making – its posthumous state – and, more personally, her own acute fragility. However, if this vision is bleakly mortal, another, recounted by Hobisoa Raininoro, is bizarrely restorative. ‘I would like to weave the hands of guests during an opening. Once the weaving is done, I will put a canvas on it, then I will close the door and leave. I will leave them all woven together in the room.’ A happening? A living installation? Commentary on the integrality of things and humans, the marmoreal and the living? What both visions surely imply is that Madame Zo was far removed from the cool insouciance of the contemporary art world, that for her art embodied mortality, human fallibility and grace, some mystical choreography. And here I am reminded of the lyrics from ‘Mad World’, the song by Tears for Fears – the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I ever had.
‘Integrating/combining/diverting’ is Hemerson Andrianetrazafy’s summation of Madame Zo’s process. If one could argue, after Saliou, that Madame Zo’s art is abyssal, she also recognized the core Malagasy value – tsy misy dikany, tsy misy fotony – that ‘no being, thing or fact can be exempt from meaning.’ Therein lies the root paradox – that art is as nameable as it is not. Which is why, unsurprisingly, Madame Zo describes her work as ‘crazy creations’ – ‘Adala be’, deranged and deranging, even mad. Hers, however, is a singular madness, which Nietzsche rightly sees as rare. As Andree Mathilde Etheve notes, ‘Madame Zo wanted to surprise and amaze.’ To do so, she had to break from the fold, interpret the world otherwise, create ‘a universe which took after her.’ That Madame Zo chose to weave the world in her own fractured image is no narcissistic endeavour. Rather, the embodied radically subjective self is the means through which to divert that which has been integrated and combined – a viscerally and psychically deconstructive enterprise through which newness becomes possible. For one cannot ignore the extremity of Madame Zo’s departure from tradition. While profoundly connected to others, her works are not communal. What they are is a weaving of strange hands, dissonant bodies, broken hearts, which in a bizarre synthesis allows for some fragile misshapen harmony. This, perhaps, could also be understood to be the artist’s philosophy – that while we might be born astride a grave, devastatingly solitary, we can and do find ways in which to connect. If she chose to be alone, it is because she sought an uncommon path.
And yet, because of her solitary mad world Madame Zo has become greatly beloved. The monumental show at Fondation H – a once derelict 19th-century post office in the Madagascan capital city of Antananarivo, transformed into a contemporary art museum with flowing arches and a terracotta, green, watery and woody central courtyard – proved both immensely consoling and invigorating. Locally, the impact proved epic. But as the foundation’s president, Hassanein Hiridjee, notes, Madame Zo’s art still has ‘far too little presence internationally, but it is radiating now.’ And as the foundation’s director, Margaux Huille, adds, ‘Madame Zo’s work is now pulsing to a new beat.’ Doubtless, it is the diverting combinations of materials that proved the strange attractor, their tactility and monochromatic luminescence. But perhaps it is the gnomic innards of Madame Zo’s works that compelled the more – their sacramental yet profane nature. What is certain is that she understood the magnetic power of art, its corruptible lure, but also, despite her acute sense of fragility, the potentiality of its immortality. Faith, after all, is nothing more than potential. Titled Bientot je vous tisse tous / Soon I will weave you all, the artist’s saying has proved prophetic.
Arriving at the departure lounge of the Antananarivo airport, an hour remaining before my return flight to Johannesburg, I saw two of the works that I knew were on show. There they were … vast squares … the one made of strips of plastic and woodchips, the other of shimmering steel piping, metallic thread, black fabric, shards of mirrored glass. In Madame Zo’s art, it is never the cohesive sheen that mesmerizes, but the ‘crack’, the ‘abyss’, which de Beauvoir recognized as indissolubly human. I was moved on seeing an empty wheelchair stationed in front of the metallic artwork, the steel armature of the chair a perfect mirroring. Mortality sounded once again. Fragility and Beauty. But also, some unerring sense of the eternal. For certainly, Madame Zo is the Malagasy Madonna, the island’s great artist of the sacred and the profane. But she is also a figure for our global present and future. Which is why, all the more, we must embrace her potent currency. As the anthropologist Sarah Fee rightly notes, to suppose Madame Zo’s art little more than an eccentric mix of ‘found objects, been there done that’, as one complacent New York art critic remarked on seeing the work at the Smithsonian in 2002, is to get it horribly wrong. Objects are found, cherished, buried, lost, forsaken. Objects momentarily root us in an ephemeral world. It is as gnomic woven objects that Madame Zo’s works bind and confound us. ‘Been there done that’ only suffices if it speaks to an eternal recurrence. Then again, nothing ever returns as it once was, everything morphs. And if monumentality and entropy are the defining qualities of Madame Zo’s art – why it is greatly loved, why it will endure – it is because of the profundity of its great impermanence.
Notes
All quotes appear in the catalogue, Bientot je vous tisse tous / Soon I will weave you all, Antananarivo: Fondation H, 2024.