Frieda Ekotto is a Professor at the University of Michigan, where she teaches Comparative Literature and Afroamerican and African Studies. A writer, she is, like Koyo Kouoh, Swiss-Cameroonian and American, and she is Koyo’s oldest friend; she was the one who introduced us exactly one year ago. We saw each other again in Dakar at Koyo’s farewell last June. Since then, our exchanges have deepened. An expert on Frantz Fanon, I invited her for the exhibition FANON antinomies, presented at SOMETHING art space through 29 November 2025. Frieda deserves to be better known on the Paris scene, and she was the obvious choice as guest editor of this inaugural edition of PROFILES papier. This conversation returns to the themes of this edition: Koyo’s legacy, the question of centrality, and Fanonian coordinates for thinking the present.
Anna-Alix Koffi
What part of Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial method, her rigor, her geopolitics of the gaze, do you wish to extend editorially here?
Frieda Ekotto
Koyo worked organically, in a way inseparable from her being in the world. Her work was never split off from her life. She thought, wrote, and acted in one and the same movement. She embodied a curatorial practice that was living, humane, almost respiratory. When I speak of her today, I think of that ability to weave thought and relation. She worked with people, not on them. That is the energy we need to reactivate in our texts, our conversations, and our projects. Her presence continues to accompany me. She is part of the conversations happening now. Everyone speaks of her in the present tense, of her ethics, her courage, her way of opening spaces and connecting voices. This is not a gesture of memory; it is a spur to courage that we must continue to set in motion
Anna-Alix Koffi
In your different texts where Koyo appears, whether in the conversation with Oyindamola Fakeye, in the exchange with Tiona Nekkia McClodden, or in the poetic dialogue you imagined between her and her other great friend Otobong Nkanga, how do you construct an active memory of Koyo, not as a simple homage but as a driver of thought?
Frieda Ekotto
Koyo’s presence is always active. Even in her absence, she circulates. We keep speaking of her as if she were here. Her thought, her ethics, and her audacity crisscross our discussions and our gestures. She dared to think differently, to connect distant voices, to create spaces of trust. I believe that this energy pushes us today to act with the same integrity. Koyo’s memory is not commemorative; it is operative. It compels us to transform remembrance into action.
Anna-Alix Koffi
Paris connects Koyo, you, and me. It is where you introduced us last year. It was precisely 14 October 2024, at the We Are ONA Brutalisten dinner hosted by her close friend Carsten Höller. A few months later, I presented his piece Fara Fara at SOMETHING art space. That was my first meeting with you and my last moment with Koyo, a sign I do not forget. Before turning to the Paris scene, could you tell us how you first met her, and what sign, from the very beginning, announced in your view her exceptional trajectory?
Frieda Ekotto
Anne-Marie Ekollo, a dear friend and sister, is the link in our friendship. She is also called Ndolo, which means “love” in our language, Dùala. We often spoke in Dùala. I was an older sister to Koyo Kouoh. We were very young when we met. We shared the same desire: to be free. Even then, I admired her courage and her strength in forging her own path in African art. We were both counselors in a summer camp, and I immediately understood what moved her. All the activities she prepared for the youth revolved around creativity, especially art. Koyo Kouoh embodies the power of autodidacticism when it is carried by rigor, curiosity, and an uncompromising vision. Without formal academic training in art history, she traced her own path, guided by a rare intuition and a worldly intelligence. Her voice, her gaze, and her curatorial choices shifted the lines of the possible. She made continents speak to one another, reconfigured canons, and redefined what it means to think art from the South. It is no surprise that for the Venice Biennale 2026 she chose a theme that, for me, says everything about her brilliance: In a Minor Key. For Koyo, dazzling the world never meant seducing it. It meant illuminating it. Through her work, she opened spaces of thought where long-marginalized histories find voice and dignity. She proved that the autodidact is not the one who lacks, but the one who invents, who dares to see otherwise, who refuses imposed frames. Koyo did not follow traced roads; she made them. She learned in the light of the world, weaving free knowledges, listening to silences and gestures. Her gaze moved borders and opened spaces of truth. She reminds the young that to learn is first to understand how to look at the world, to dare to envision it from one’s own interiority. What remains clear for her and for us is that light sometimes comes from those who walk without a map, but with a vision. Today, her trajectory inspires an entire generation to understand that knowledge can also come from lived experience, from the collective, from travel, from free reading, from that fierce freedom to think for oneself. Rest in peace, my sister.
Fin de l'extrait.