San Nou

Spore Initiative is honored to host San Nou, a ritual-performance by Mawongany, Niyabja, and Aurélie Derard, weaving together video, movement and sound to invoke a process of transformation — from pain to healing, from mourning to metamorphosis.

Rooted in the bain démarré tradition, San Nou draws on an ancestral ritual practiced across the African diaspora in the Americas. In Martinique, this ritual bath — performed with herbs for protection, guidance, and restoration — has long been kept from public view, concealed by colonial systems of erasure. Today, it re-emerges as a living act of remembrance and renewal, a way of remaking the world in relation to both the living and the non-living.

Through poetic fragments, sonic textures, and embodied gestures, San Nou acknowledges the blood spilled through histories of violence and gestures toward a different future — one born not in spectacle but in subterranean becoming.

San Nou is part of Spore’s lasting commitment to hosting practices that reclaim and reconfigure ritual, memory and world-making.

This evening is an outcome of Spore’s ongoing collaboration with the Martinique-based association Permactivie, which supports agroecological and artistic practices rooted in ancestral knowledge.