Festival Preview 2025

Our preview event on Thursday April 3 offers an introduction to the folks and forms of our upcoming festival (Sept 11-13). We’ll be visited in person and digitally by Maboula Soumahoro and Lou Mensah, this year’s curators. Soumahoro and Mensah will introduce the international artists they suggested and we’ll give snippets of some of this year’s workshops. Emma van Meyeren’s ‘Dairies as a feminist genre’ and Adama Keïta’s session on Maryse Condé, for example. And yes, that is absolutely as amazing as it sounds. Attendees will be invited to fall into the unpredictable feeling of dérive and the chaos that comes with it through lectures, echoes of resonance and collective writing

Meet us at Tolhuistuin’s Zonzij for our gathering with Maboula Soumahoro, Lou Mensah (Shade Podcast), Adama Keïta, and Read My World-editors Emma van Meyeren, Pelumi Adejumo and Simone Zeefuik. Doors open at 19.30h and the program is from 19.30h-21.30h.

Raise your bookmarks if you already secured your spot; be sure to visit our website to do so if you haven’t already.

GUESTS

Maboula Soumahoro

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France.

She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name(Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. This book was distinguished by the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.

She was the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta (2021-2022) ; Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and Visiting Faculty at Bennington College (2022-2023) and served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2013-2017).

She translated Saidiya Hartman classic work, Lose Your Mother : A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) from English as À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l’esclavage released in September 2023 (Brook).

Lou Mensah

Lou Mensah is the founder of Shade Media, the space for Black artists and creative practitioners to talk about their work in their own way. Shade’s first venture, the critically acclaimed Shade Podcast launched in 2019 and has run for 12 seasons to date. Shade Art Review, which debuted in September 2023, is a biweekly arts and culture magazine.

Lou also creates audio works for clients including the British Council, Hauser and Wirth, Frieze, Tate, Bloomberg, Iniva, Freelands Foundation, The Runnymede Trust and South London Gallery and has collaborated with artists including Liz Johnson Artur and Ming Smith on installations and recordings.

Lou is a disability and accessibility consultant, an associate lecturer in Communications at Central St. Martins University and a home educator.

Adama Keïta

Adama Keïta is an Indo-Guadeloupean, Martinican and Senegalese curator, writer, programmaker, educator, experimental movie maker and researcher. Adama Keïta currently lives in Amsterdam ( Netherlands ) , where she finalize a Master’s degree in Critical Studies at Sandberg Instituut. Her thesis research focuses on her native language, Martinican Creole / Palé Matinitjé.