Black Card: Three Days at the Film Festival with Maboula Soumahoro

To kick off its 2026–2027 season, MansA is launching N.A.R.D.A.L. — “New Approaches to Research on Afro-Diasporic Dynamics in Connection” — a new program dedicated to the thought, creativity, and activism of women from African communities. For this inaugural edition, scholar and essayist Maboula Soumahoro takes over the Maison with her “black card” and has devised a unique three-day program in homage to the Nardal sisters.

Who is speaking? In what context? On what grounds? And who is invited to listen?

It is around these questions that Maboula Soumahoro has conceived this “anti-art fair.” For this first edition of N.A.R.D.A.L., she has been given free rein to take over MansA and curate a program where different voices, practices, and forms of knowledge come together.

Far from being a traditional lecture, the “anti-salon” offers a collaborative space where ideas flow freely and the body participates just as much as the mind. It examines its own privileges, the conditions for accessing spaces for expression, and the ways in which knowledge and cultural heritage are constructed and passed down. Over the course of three days, literature, dance, music, film, cuisine, and the transmission of knowledge come together in dialogue.

The weekend will kick off on Friday evening with an outdoor reading of Maboula Soumahoro’s manifesto, presented in several languages—French, Caribbean Creole, Arabic, Lingala, and Bambara—which echo and take turns throughout the performance. The evening will continue with a DJ set by Tysha Cee.

In the Footsteps of the Nardal Sisters

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Nardal sisters were active participants in the intellectual and cultural life of their time. Among them, Paulette, Jane, and Andrée were notably involved in the literary salon held in Clamart, a place where people gathered and ideas flowed between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the United States.

In 1931, Paulette Nardal, along with other intellectuals of her time, co-founded *La Revue du monde noir*, to which her sisters Jane and Andrée also contributed. Their role in the intellectual currents that shaped Black thought and the emergence of Négritude has long been less recognized than that of the movement’s male figures and is now the subject of significant efforts to rediscover their contributions.

N.A.R.D.A.L. is part of this legacy: that of intellectual circles where ideas circulate, experiences converge, and reflection can take many forms. The program is not devoted solely to the Nardal sisters: it uses their story as a starting point to examine the place of women in the history of ideas, the circulation of intellectual thought, and the ways in which legacies are constructed, transmitted, or erased.

A New Cycle at MansA

N.A.R.D.A.L. is conceived as a series of open-ended projects entrusted to inspiring women from the African world, who are invited to “host a salon” based on their personal journeys, perspectives, and contemporary visions of the issues facing our era.

This first edition, featuring Maboula Soumahoro, kicks off the series with a transdisciplinary, accessible, and collaborative “anti-fair.” Throughout the weekend, literature, writing, dance, film, music, and cooking become different ways of thinking, sharing, and circulating experiences.

N.A.R.D.A.L. thus offers a different approach to a trade show: a space for thinking, creating, sharing, engaging in dialogue, and connecting with others.