At the heart of everything we do–are encounters

Can you tell us about Association Zofi’s origins, and the influence Martinique has had in both inspiring the organisation to exist, and in shaping your approach and outlook?

Association Zɔfi was founded in 2021 in Martinique. The project grew from a simple, but urgent, observation: that this territory needed a space dedicated to artistic production, experimentation and encounter, built around photography and contemporary arts. In 2023, that vision became Studio Lumina, an artist-run space in Fort-de-France.

The name comes directly from the land and the language. Zɔfi is the Creole word for the needlefish, the orphie, but what it really evokes is a school of fish. Not one fish, many. A collective moving together, without hierarchy, each one influencing the direction of the group. That image is foundational: the idea that culture, creation and knowledge are built collectively, that no single person holds the centre.

Martinique didn’t just provide a backdrop for our work, it built the vision. After a while, you realise that European frameworks and models don't always translate here. What the experience taught us is that the sea is not a border. That's the core idea behind one of our projects: a residency that brought together artists from Saint Lucia, Martinique and Dominica. Named An Ba Lanmè, which literally means "under the sea", the idea was rooted in the poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite's words: "the unity is submarine." Our connection to each other across the Caribbean runs deeper than geography, deeper than the water that separates the islands. We want to move like the needlefish: between territories, freely, collectively.

That’s why–at the heart of everything we do–is encounter… between artists, between territories, between communities and their own stories. Martinique moves fast, contexts shift, things change. So we stay flexible, we stay together, we keep moving, like the fish.

What is the current set up for the organisation? Are you working in one space or country, or in the process of expanding or changing your focus?

Right now, Zɔfi is literally in motion. After an initial phase built around Studio Lumina, our artist-run space in Fort-de-France, we are transitioning toward a more mobile, territorial model. The shift is intentional. A fixed space defines who comes to you. A mobile approach inverts that logic: you go to the work, to the people, to the territory.

In practice that means deploying residencies, exhibitions, and participatory projects across different locations, within Martinique and across the region. Projects like An Ba Lanmè, Temwanyaj [a cultural heritage and photography project] and Bay Chabon [a recent art–ecology project in Martinique focused on the creative and social potentials of biochar, a type of charcoal produced by heating organic material through pyrolysis] are the concrete expression of that. It's a transition, and we're building as we go. But the direction is clear.

Who does Association Zofi work to empower and support? Are there particular artists you want to reach, or certain artistic outputs that you focus upon?

Zɔfi operates from Martinique, supporting local artists and communities year-round, while extending its reach across the Caribbean to extend the focus on South-South exchanges.

At the core, we support emerging and more established artists, particularly those working at the intersection of photography, visual arts, and social realities. We're especially committed to artists from the Caribbean region, people whose practice is rooted in this territory and its histories, but who don't always have access to the infrastructure, networks or resources that artists elsewhere take for granted.

Beyond artists, we work directly with communities such as young people, people with limited access to cultural spaces. Projects like Temwanyaj are built around their stories, their memories, their voices. The artistic output is inseparable from the human process.

In terms of what we produce: photography and image-based practices are central to our methodology. Both as an artistic medium and as a tool for civic participation and collective memory. But we also develop residencies, participatory workshops, public events and editorial projects.

Right now, we are building a collective of associated artists — a shared structure where artists can pool resources, carry projects together and contribute to a common programme. It's just getting started, but it's the direction we're most excited about.

What are some of the social issues that artists you work with often want to address through their work? And how do you seek to help them with these? What are the benefits of your work you’ve seen upon those artists you enable and support?

The social issues our artists engage with are deeply rooted in Caribbean realities. The question of identity, memory, belonging, the legacy of colonial histories, the invisibilisation of communities and their stories. Many of the artists we work with are asking fundamental questions about what it means to live here, to create here, to be seen from here.

What we've seen most clearly through An Ba Lanmè is the power of the ecosystem we create. When you bring artists together across Caribbean territories, different islands, different contexts, different practices, something happens that wouldn't happen otherwise. New collaborations emerge. People who didn't know each other find a common language. And it doesn't stop at the Caribbean. We also create bridges with artists from elsewhere, whose questions intersect with ours. The richness comes from that encounter: not a one-way exchange, but a mutual conversation where everyone leaves with something they didn't have before.

What are the barriers in the arts world that Association Zofi particularly seeks to help overcome? And are these particular to your area of operations, or do you see such barriers reflected in the arts world in a wider sense?

I studied IT engineering. I came to photography on my own, travelling, figuring things out without a network or a production budget. I suppose that's why removing those barriers for other artists feels so personal. We didn't build Zɔfi from the outside looking in. We built it because we knew exactly what was missing, and decided to try to transform those obstacles into something useful.

The first barrier is access to resources: absorbing the administrative and financial weight so artists can experiment without having to justify every idea before it even exists.

The second is circulation. Circulation of people, of knowledge, of practices. In the Caribbean, geographic fragmentation creates real isolation. Artists on neighbouring islands can be completely invisible to each other. Again that is something I experienced in my own work and poured back into Zofi’s DNA. We create the conditions for exchange across generations and across territories because the conversation between a young artist finding their practice and someone who has been navigating this landscape for twenty years is irreplaceable. The question of transmission has become very important to us.

But the deepest barrier, and this is one we've learned ourselves (sometimes the hard way), is the idea that art belongs in an exhibition space. [The idea] that culture is something you go to, not something that comes to you. In Martinique, as in many places, that model excludes the majority. So we've made a deliberate choice to go where people are: neighbourhoods, public spaces, schools, the street.

It's not a comfortable shift. It means questioning your own assumptions every day! About what legitimacy looks like, what art is, where it belongs, who it's for. We're not outside of that process. We're inside it, working through it constantly, unlearning as much as we're building.

As I understand it, community is at the core of your work, the ‘local context’ - can you explain a little about that approach and the benefits that working in that way offer?

Community is at the core of everything, it's embedded in our name. A school of fish, moving together, without hierarchy, each one influencing the direction of the collective. That's not a metaphor we chose lightly.

There's the community in the traditional sense: the neighbourhoods, the residents, the people who don't naturally find their way into an exhibition space. That work is deeply local, deeply relational. You can't do it from a distance and it takes a lot of time. But the artistic community itself is also a community we serve. Caribbean artists operate far from the infrastructures that artists in Western contexts take for granted. We don't want to have to export ourselves. We need to create the conditions for thriving right here.

At the heart of it all is encounter. The act of meeting, talking, exchanging, sitting in the same room, sharing a meal, debating an idea. That sounds simple, but it's actually radical in a context where fragmentation is the norm. Community, for us, is not a concept or a target group. It's what happens when people actually meet. And our role is to create the conditions for that to happen, between artists, between generations, between islands, between communities and their own stories. The rest follows naturally.

What are the challenges, and potential rewards, of this mobile way of working you are developing?

I'm not sure we've fully figured out what this model looks like yet, honestly. But after three years working from a fixed space, the experience has been clear: the conventional model doesn't fully correspond to our reality or our territory. The projects that worked best were always the participatory ones, where the public wasn't an audience but an art maker. The moment we stepped outside the white cube logic, people who would never have walked through a studio door showed up. That was an honest lesson.

The challenges are real. Without a fixed space you have to work harder to exist in people's minds. But the rewards are significant. You become present in more places, closer to communities a fixed space would never have reached. And making art participatory, integrating the public as art makers rather than spectators, is ultimately the most powerful way we know to make art genuinely accessible.

Mobile, collaborative, participatory. That's where Zɔfi is heading now.

Where do you hope that Association Zofi will be in two years’ time, and how will your grant be used to move you toward that place?

In two years, we want Zɔfi’s new model to be operational: a collective platform, where emerging Caribbean artists have real access to resources, networks and production tools, and where the organisation is stable enough to sustain that over time rather than project by project.

Concretely, that means a small but solid core team, a functioning collective of associated artists, an active mobile programme reaching communities across the territory, and An Ba Lanmè continuing to grow as a regional cooperation network.

The grant from The Supporting Act Foundation would move us directly toward that.

The first priority is production capacity. A production house doesn't necessarily require a fixed space. It requires the means to produce: ideas, projects, events, works. That can be carried by shared equipment, by activating partner spaces when needed, by building up the collective where artists pool resources and support each other's practice.

The second priority is people: securing key collaborators in stable roles rather than relying on fragile freelance arrangements.

And the third is visibility: bringing in someone dedicated to communication, because right now we are producing projects that not enough people see. That has to change.