The Nardal Salon, Re-enactments and Re-enchantments

During the 1920s and 30s, Paulette Nardal and her sister Jeanne ‘Jane’ transformed their home in Clamart into one of the most influential spaces for Black intellectuals during the interwar period. The Nardal Salon was an incubator for ideas, debates and cultural exchange, laying the foundations for the emergence of the Négritude movement. Through gatherings at their salon and the publication of the Revue du Monde Noir (1931–32), the Nardal sisters helped to establish Paris as an intellectual hub for the Black world, with the participation of writers, pedagogues, artists, and activists like Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Léon Damasand, Suzanne Lacascade, René Maran, their sister Andrée Nardal, Léo Sajous, Léopold Senghor, and many others. 

The Nardal Salon, Re-enactments and Re-enchantments revives the salon as a space of presence, collective thought, and political imagination. Drawing on the legacy of the Nardal sisters’ activities in interwar Paris, the project approaches the salon as a living practice. In a moment marked by growing backlash against pluralism and shrinking spaces for dissent, the salon becomes a necessary infrastructure for thinking together. By connecting the Parisian salon to other diasporic spaces of gathering such as shebeens, grins, and achombo houses, the project asks how critical, communal spaces can be sustained today as sites of resistance, solidarity, and future-making. The series of re-enactments and re-enchantments at HKW employs literature, poetry, dance, performance, music, and other artistic modes of expression and highlights contemporary forms of salon practices from Abidjan, Berlin, Dakar, Douala, Paris, and beyond.