Le Salon des Écoutes Réparatrices (A salon for reparative vibrations)

What if the Nardal sisters kept talking to us? What if their salon still existed — like a frequency that traverses time, oceans, and memories?

Pascale Obolo's project takes the form of a video performance installation based on research on AFRIKADAA: Politics of Sound #2. Obolo imagines the Nardal Sisters' Salon as a living architecture of listening: a place of peace where images, voices and music are no longer presented as documents of the past, but appear as active presences that are able to open up alternative future perspectives. Le Salon des Écoutes Réparatrices revives the intellectual, political and emotional heritage of the Nardal sisters through an immersive experience of listening, reading and sharing sounds together. For Obolo, the salon becomes a space for sensual communication and healing in the face of a history of colonial violence and the obliteration of black memories.

At the heart of this concept are video sound readings from the Black Sound Archives compiled by Obolo, which aim to reveal the invisible continualities between the emancipatory struggles of the 20th century and the imaginary worlds of the 21st century.

The performance is guided by a simple yet speculative question: If Paulette and Jane Nardal were alive today, what music would they listen to to continue thinking about the world?