Sitting on a stool, Pénélope knits, then unravels her knitting until the early hours of the morning. She is waiting for a man, who has gone out to meet another woman. In the evenings, in order to reassure her little girl, worried by her father’s absence, Pénélope tells her daughter a story: the legend of the Amazons, deported by sea via slave ships as part of triangular trade. This is the story of those who cross the ocean at risk of their lives to reach the promised land. It is also the legend of other Amazons, those who leave their country for their studies, never to return. Le syndrome de Pénélope revisits the myth of the famously patient wife of Ulysses, and cleverly draws a parallel with three phenomena that have emptied, and continue to empty Africa of its constructive force. Carmen Fifamè was the artist in residence in the autumn of 2022 at Nova Villa, where this text was written.