Radical Space: Salon Verite, by Clarice Gargard (2025)

For centuries, the salon has been the place where writers, artists, activists, thinkers and doers come together to discuss worldly matters. No one knows exactly where it began, but we know of examples such as the literary Chambre Blue of the French Madame de Rambouillet or the Harlem Renaissance in A'Lelia Walker's Dark Tower Townhouse, where black intellectuals, queers and the wretched of the earth united. These were often experimental spaces set up by those pushed to the margins of society. Spaces where time stands still for a moment and the rules subversively bend to the occupants. Spaces to share, reflect, heal and give new impetus to culture and the outside world.

Because the regular programming of the International Theatre Amsterdam started with a big international project. But if that's the case, who do you invite to give the Radical Space season the strong start it deserves? The answer is Clarice Gargard. Inspired by the history of the saloon, Clarice created a work in progress, called Salon Verité - Under the Dragon's Blood Tree. She turned ITA's Bookshop-stage into a space where truth and art meet.

We live in a time of fake news, gaslighting and deception by government leaders and popular media, but we also wear masks in our daily lives. Why are we so afraid of the truth? And what happens when we create the conditions for honesty and openness? What if the responsibility for the space is shared with everyone who is part of it? What if we dare to speak from who we really are and not how we think we should present ourselves? Is sharing the truth an equaliser or a maker of who is right?

On this evening, traditional African storytelling mixes with modern forms of storytelling, art and ritual to discover the truths hidden within us. The focus is on the music of kora musician and griot Lamin Kuyateh. In the West African tradition of storytellers, the keepers of history and the link between worlds, he will guide us through the evening. Truth tellers Zinzi de Brouwer, Mark Mills and Sunni Lamin Barrow will share their truths through performance and ritual.

This programme was inspired by the book After Resistance Comes (R)evolution and made possible in part by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Clarice Gargard

Clarice Gargard is an award-winning journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker and organiser who combines journalism, art, social justice, philosophy and mysticism. In 2025, her acclaimed book ‘From Resistance to (R)evolution’ was published, in which she explores what we as individuals can do to initiate a personal and social (r)evolution.

Lamin Kuyateh

Lamin Kuyateh is a griot and belongs to a family of kora players and storytellers from Gambia. The kora is an ancient and familiar African musical instrument, a harp with 25 to 27 strings. Lamin grew up with kora music. He regularly performs both within and outside the Netherlands.

Sunni Lamin Barrow

Sunni Lamin Barrow (born 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator from Gambia, living in the Netherlands. His multi-award-winning practice explores identity, connectedness and the resilience of the human spirit, particularly through the lens of the experiences of African queer refugees.

Combining poetry, performance and curation, Sunni explores themes such as love, loneliness, queerness, blackness, global citizenship and the reinterpretation of kinship. His work continues to bridge personal narratives and collective resonance, creating a bold and lasting artistic legacy.

Zinzi & Mark Mills

Zinzi is a guardian of ancestral wisdom with knowledge of nature and plant medicine. With her shamanic artistry, she inspires sovereignty and radical love. Her work is rooted in the legacy of her ancestors; one of healing, connection and freedom. She is accompanied by Mark Mills (Kaya Namase), an artist and shaman who uses music, voice and instruments such as the chapaka and indigenous flutes for transformation. With the power of sound, he inspires shadow work, ancestral connection and inner freedom.

Context Minor Music

As mentioned, there was a big theatre production in the Grand Hall. That production was called Minor Music at the End of the World, and it adapts for the stage Saidiya Hartman’s acclaimed essays “The End of White Supremacy” and “Litany for Grieving Sisters.” This new work takes as its point of departure W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Comet, a speculative fictional tale of the end of the world written in the wake of the pandemic of 1918.

Luckily Salon Verite and Minor Music complimented each other. Both were making many futuristic literary references and were both in conversation with historic crises in Black life in the context of racial capitalism, managed depletion, and white supremacy.

Against this complexly layered backdrop, the words of Clarice and Sunni called for truth telling in a world where lies able to dominate if you create a system, a logic and a marketing strategy around them. In such a world the truth is threatening, hard to live by, but evidently liberating. Zinzi and Mark complimented that by introducing the truth as a pathway to spiritual healing, both individually as in community. Will we continue to seek the truth once we leave this safe, brave, radical space?

Minor Music on the other hand conveys an ongoing series of catastrophes that converge at this critical inflection point — among others, the arrival of Africans in New York City, the first slave auction in lower Manhattan, the precarity of Black life, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes that make life seemingly unlivable. In doing so, it provokes a series of penetrating questions about Black life at the end of the world and the new social formations that arise in its wake.

Minor Music Credits

Directed by Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World features cinematic elements by Arthur Jafa, lead performances by actor André Holland and actor/sonic movement artist Okwui Okpokwasili. Minor Music is an evening-length performance presented without intermission. Produced by the Hartwig Foundation in collaboration with ITA.