Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky M’Baye – d’encens, clou de girofle, mouton, thé brûlé, jasmin de nuit, 2026

Drawing on archival research and family history, Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s film traces the nineteenth-century trade in gum arabic. This highly prized resin, harvested from acacia trees in northern Senegal, travelled along the river to Saint-Louis and across the Atlantic to France. In Lyon, it was used in the silk, printing and bookbinding industries. Before French colonial rule extended into the Senegal River valley, Signares – women of African and European descent who became influential merchants in Saint-Louis – and their families participated in an economy sustained through kinship and exchange with inland traders. The film follows a dreamlike boat journey between Saint-Louis and former trading posts upriver towards Podor. From the balcony of a merchant house, the young daughter of a Signare watches gum arabic depart across the Atlantic while recalling journeys undertaken with her father.

Through moving image and installation, Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye questions the material and immaterial conditions through which belonging is shaped and experienced. Her practice is grounded in an iterative, ritualistic process of thinking through making, where research, gesture and image evolve in close relation. Drawing on genealogical and archival fragments, she constructs narratives that move between speculation and poetic form. Attentive to colonial and diasporic histories, she asks how the intercultural body navigates an inheritance that is unfixed and fragmented and how historical complexity and cultural incompleteness might act as mediums from which critical, self-preserving narratives emerge.