exsudat (2025)

Overview

In a Western European museum, a protagonist examines paintings containing traces of gum arabic — a substance extracted from Acacia trees, including Acacia Senegal — summoning the ghosts of intermediary merchants: the Signares, bourgeois Senegalese women who played a central role in the ‘hors-territoire’ trade of gum and gold from the 16th to the 20th centuries.