Benin and Ghana have emerged as symbolic destinations for people of African descent seeking reconnection, meaning, and belonging. In Benin, contemporary cultural policy has elevated Vodun as a central axis of national identity and tourism. In Ghana, the 2019 Year of Return campaign transformed the country into a global stage for remembrance - an invitation to both festive celebration in Accra’s streets and solemn pilgrimage to Cape Coast, where countless ancestors were once held before their forced departure to the Americas.

Yet one must ask: what do these visitors truly encounter in their return?

What they meet is a carefully composed narrative; a choreography of memory. Their journey usually begins with ritual acts of reclamation: adopting an Akan day name - Barbara becomes Abena, John becomes Kwame - or adopting local aesthetics and symbols through hairstyles, garments, or tattoos.

And yet there remains a haunting question: can one ever truly return? When does the act of return cease to be a performance and becomes a homecoming?

It is within this tension that Dimitri Fagbohoun’s work resides. His practice, spanning drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, unfolds as a meditation on fractured belonging and the impossibility of a “pure” return. A Beninese-Ukrainian-French artist, Fagbohoun embodies the multiplicity of identities that both anchor and estrange. Through his exploration of Vodun, he transforms spirituality into an inner landscape, where ritual becomes metaphor and symbol becomes self. His works do not merely depict return, they inhabit the space between departure and arrival, visibility and concealment, body and spirit.

As poet Dionne Brand reminds us, “The Door of No Return is a place as much metaphorical as psychological, as much imaginary as real.” Return, then, is not restoration—it is reinvention. It demands fragmentation, renaming, and re-becoming.

The Revenants invites us to dwell in that in-between: to question whether the journey home is ever complete, and whether art, like identity, can ever truly return to its point of origin.