Q&A: Tricontinental Cinema Artist Maya Mihindou

I began to draw as a little kid, and I think I continued when I was a teenager mostly because I love comics and stuff like that, and manga. At 16, I began to create do-it-yourself zines with friends, and they were really stupid shit. But just creating a journal by myself made me meet a lot of other artists doing the same. And, for me, it has been really cool to meet all those artists doing do-it-yourself stuff.

After that, at school, I wanted to do art studies, but I stayed a month and just went out, because it was really far from the world I knew at that moment; I really came from comic stuff. At the same moment, my mother died, and it was a real shock. And for me, it's linked together because art became something else at that moment to me. During maybe two or three years, drawing was just a need to express things that you can't really express. So, yeah, I drew a lot, and a lot, and a lot. It was more a way to question what was happening to me, but also the beginning of a bigger questioning about identity and identities. And, I continued to create zines, and I was trying to make some studies of history and anthropology, which was very interesting.

I think what has been important for me is this moment, because I never stopped after that. And I don't know how it happened, but someone offered me the possibility to do a comic book, but very free and with a lady that I really admire, Barbara Canepa. And yeah, I realized that somebody told me, "OK, we trust what you do, so you should go on and continue this way.”

This is how I really began to go into art with the need of express myself after the important grief of my mom, who is from Africa and who was my key to go back to the country I was born in. The loss of somebody from another country is also a loss of your possibility of having that cultural feed and asking questions—understanding your history, but also understanding the bigger history. 

Sometimes I need to write, sometimes I need to draw, but it's really for me the same stuff. I really like reading, and I really like poets and literature. So it's quite casual. 

For example, during this show I talk about Aimé Césaire, who was someone that changed my life when I was very young, maybe 17 years old. I read for the first time Discourse on Colonialism because of school. There was a small project and we were free to choose anybody, and we don’t study Aimé Césaire or Black writers in France. I was so shocked to realize that there are people like that, that are talking to your bones really. The power of words came because I found a powerful Black writer, and I realized, we can talk to our memories.

Because I was doing some zines, I was writing for those, and I began to experiment with journalism—interviews, going to speak to people, because I always need to have the real things first. It's always like that when I work on anything. I need to understand the whole situation. It’s been really serious, the writing, the transmitting of information, To help people who don’t write to say what they need to say. I really love collaborating to help people express themselves. For years with a collective of some friends, we did a magazine called Ballast, 10 or 11 issues. It still exists but not in paper, only on the internet. 

So, for a long time, writing was something apart from art. I was also writing poetry or text like that. But journalism was something and art was something else. François Piron from the Palais de Tokyo, [the organizer of Tricontinental Cinema], he knew the magazine I was writing in. He's very into independent journals and stuff. Maybe three, four years ago, he contacted me for this project. He said, “You’re writing and drawing. You know what? Do everything.” And it’s been really important for me to connect all my practices.

I first heard of her work when she died in 2021 from COVID. I was following some groups of Black arts in France and there [is an actress who has shared information on movies and other things that are hard to find]. And she shared some excerpts of Sambizanga and said, "Sarah Maldoror is dead now and she's not known in her own country." 

I was so shocked that I did some research and I realized, there is this Black woman who filmed African liberation struggle in the Portuguese African countries and we don't know her." It was the same shock as with Césaire when I was younger. Because I'm mixed race—I'm from France and Gabon—for me, it's very important to have pieces of both of our histories, which is also violent history, and to be able to understand the link between us now. And so, I researched Maldoror, and I was really… greedy about finding stuff about her. 

There is a magazine called The Funambulist that asked me to draw the cover of an issue about Pan-Africanism. And I proposed drawing Sarah Maldoror because it was the year she died. They told me, "It's a good idea, but if we talk about Pan-Africanism, you can't just put Sarah Maldoror. She's a part of bigger thing." So I drew a cover with a lot of African diasporic people, Sarah Maldoror and others. Then, François and Cédric [Fauq, the curators of Tricontinental Cinema] asked me to do something for the exhibition. 

This is not exactly the first time [my work has been] in a contemporary art museum, but this is not the kind of institution I typically work with. I do covers for books or illustrate texts or stuff like that. But because I was so into this subject, I said, "Yes, of course, I'll do anything he wants." 

Annouchka de Andrade and her sister were doing a big thing to organize their parents’ archives, but it was really the beginning of the process. We didn’t have a proper biography. It took time to understand the whole filmography. But I spent time with the curators in the archives and with Annouchka, who was very generous.

If I remember well, they told me, "Maybe you can help [people] to understand the historical moments." But for me, as I told you, I really need to understand the whole thing—historical, political. Even if my drawing can be very oneiric or not realistic, it always comes first from real life. 

When I went to the archives, they [had already done] great work on her movies and Annouchka permitted me to watch them. I quickly realized that Sarah Maldoror has traveled three continents, she’s been in the French Caribbean islands and in the US, she’s met famous poets and famous political people. In this beginning of dreaming of independence in Africa, she was there.

But what shocked me was that she was born in the countryside in France. She’s mixed race—her father was from Guadeloupe—born in Gers in the ‘30s. It was really something not common at that moment, to be a Black person in the countryside in France, in the ‘30s, during colonialism. It was really something weird. 

And when I asked to Annouchka, "How did it happen?" She told me, "We don't know much about her childhood. She never talked about this. For her, it was past and she didn't care." And it was really like, becoming an obsession to understand what happened. She didn’t know much about her Guadeloupe side. How did a Black woman from the [southwest] of France, who didn't grow up in Africa, become obsessed to identify with the Black people’s struggle and understand that she had to go in Africa? 

I did a lot of research just to have the context of where she grew up, what was the moment, what was happening at that time. Obviously, there had been the war. And Annouchka explained, "What we know is that when she was a kid, the police or [government] took her from her mom because her dad died when she was a baby." 

They sent her to another area in France, to a religious place for kids that was not really cool. She was very young, under 10 years old. And she spent the war there. Then there isn’t much information. She changed her name, Sarah Ducados, to Sarah Maldoror. And she chose to be first an actress, then a filmmaker. 

What happened? We don't know, but we can just imagine this moment of [getting through] World War II, being a Black woman and stuck far from your family, and then arriving in Paris. I think she was a [gym] teacher or something. Then she found Présence Africaine, a bookstore where there were a lot of Black people like Césaire and others, and she just quit everything to be in this intellectual movement. This was, for me, totally fascinating.