We are delighted to welcome Joey Aresoa, a multidisciplinary artist from Madagascar, for a six-week residency at G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos. She joins us as the inaugural Fondation H resident, part of a new cross-residency programme developed between Antananarivo and Lagos. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, literature, and digital media, Joey’s practice explores memory, identity, and oral transmission through the lenses of storytelling and symbolism. Her work often weaves poetry and visual art together, reactivating myths and legends while addressing erasures within collective narratives.
During her residency, Joey will immerse herself in Nigeria’s oral traditions, focusing on oriki and its contemporary transformations. She plans to attend poetry slams, cultural gatherings, and storytelling sessions while meeting poets, artists, and cultural custodians whose work engages with gender, land, symbolism, and belonging. This immersion will allow her experiment with new creative processes and expand her practice, developing a body of work that intertwines poetry, narrative, and symbolism with the dialogues and encounters that emerge in Lagos. Joey envisions the residency as a space of creativity, exchange, and meaningful connection, and an opportunity to explore how oral traditions continue to evolve within contemporary artistic expression.
Photographer Credit: Franco Clerc
What is the current focus of your creative practice?
My current creative practice focuses on exploring memory, identity, and transmission through storytelling, poetry, and visual art. I work with themes of loss, disappearing voices, and ancestral connections, often blending sound, performance, digital art and installation.
Photographer Credit: VAVY
What drew you to apply for this residency and how do you think it will inform your wider practice?
This residency feels like a very natural continuation of my artistic journey, which has been marked by my recent installation AntsaAngano—an anticipatory library of the stories of our heroes, envisioned as it should be. Following Inka Shonibare’s exhibition in Antananarivo, the possibility of doing a residency at G.A.S. in Lagos was sparked. Being in Nigeria, immersed in its culture and traditions, offers a unique opportunity to expand this exploration of how stories shape identity and connect us to our roots. I see this residency as a chance to deepen my research and creative practice, weaving together poetry, visual art, and performance in new ways informed by these powerful cultural dialogues.
Photographer Credit: Fondation H
Can you give us an insight into how you hope to use the opportunity?
This residency represents more than a professional step. It's a personal journey toward a place I’ve long felt connected to in spirit but have yet to fully experience. I want to immerse myself in oral traditions, not only to study their structure or symbolism but to feel their heartbeat and understand how they shape identity from within the community. I am deeply interested in how stories are not just told, but lived and embodied, how memory, language, land, and lineage intertwine in ways that resonate beyond words. This residency offers me the chance to witness that living transmission firsthand, to listen deeply and to let it transform my own artistic language. I hope this experience will allow me to bring forth work that is both intimate and universal, grounded in ancestral voices yet speaking to contemporary realities.
About Joey Aresoa
Joey Aresoa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Madagascar whose work explores the power of personal and collective narratives. She investigates the persistence and erasure of stories that shape our identities, with a particular focus on memory and oral transmission. Her creative approach is rooted in reactivating myths and legends, crafting everyday heroines to strengthen their representation in response to dominant narratives. Joey’s practice spans visual arts, poetry, and performance, often creating immersive and sensory installations that invite audiences to engage deeply with the themes of identity and history.
In her figurative work, she addresses iconographies inherited from colonization, creating a dialogue between past and present while questioning the meanings imposed by colonial history. This approach underscores the importance of revisiting and reinventing visual narratives as a way to reclaim and reimagine our image.
Photographer Credit: Franco Clerc
Joey Aresoa's residency is generously supported by Fondation H.
