Mbissine. Thérèse. Diop.

This is the civilian name of the actress who played the main character in Ousmane Sembene's 1966 feature film La Noire De... (Black Girl). In this film, the actress plays a governess hired by a French family whom she follows to France. The film enjoyed a remarkable international career, winning acclaim at the Dakar World Festival of Black Arts in 1966 and the Tanit d'Or at the Carthage International Film Festival the same year. Praises for the film and its director are numerous. Yet the memory of its lead actress is relegated to the periphery.

As part of her residency at Selebe Yoon, Johanna Makabi proposes a collage of visual and audiovisual archives on three simultaneous screens, articulating resources collected from the Direction de la Cinématographie (DCI) and the Fonds d'Archives Africains pour la Sauvegarde des Mémoires (ASM fund).

At Selebe Yoon, the filmmaker creates her first multimedia installation, Nostalgia of a black actress, which articulates various resources collected during her residency in Dakar.

The installation includes footage taken at the Direction de la Cinématographie du Sénégal, revealing the conservation and processing of archives; photographs from Mbissine Thérèse Diop's private archive; filmed, intimate moments of Mbissine in her Paris apartment; mixed with contextual elements such as an extract from the collection Voltaïque (1962), from which the screenplay for La Noire de... was taken, and the original poster for the film La Noire de....This visual material is combined with Mbissine Thérèse Diop's voice-over in previously unpublished interviews between the actress and the director, revealing her counter-narrative, her intimacy, her youth and her exile.

Playing a central role in the nascent post-independence film industry, she has been seen, recognized and criticized in her own country for being the first black woman on screen. Nostalgia of a Black Actress tells the story of Mbissine Thérèse Diop, an embodied archive, the remaining repository of her Voice thus restored.

This residency is supported by L’Institut Français du Sénégal.