She Who Summons, 2025

Experimental Dance Short Film by Mallory Lowe Mpoka– Senegal, 2025

Set against the backdrop of a red-soiled quarry in Mbour village, Senegal, She Who Summons is a poetic and experimental dance film exploring the shifting terrain between two women—their gestures, their silences, and the charged space between them. Through choreography that blurs the boundaries between ritual and relationship, tension and tenderness, the film excavates the layers of love, friendship, and emotional memory inscribed in the body.

The film begins with the breath of Peul flutist Papalaye Cissokho, grandson of the master Mandingue “korafolas” Soundioulou Cissokho—calling a tale to life, rooted in the rhythm of oral tradition. As dancers Ngossé Mbaye and Amy Collé Seck—both graduates of the internationally renowned École des Sables—move across the quarry’s scarred earth, their connection unfolds in fragments: touch, refusal, mirroring, retreat. The soil is not just ground, but witness; it clings, marks, receives. In its red dust, they summon what is unspoken: a soft power, a remembered ache, a call toward care.

Quarries—sites of extraction that disrupt ecosystems—are both setting and silent subject. Yet even in this wounded terrain, life persists. Resilient, medicinal plants like the Apple of Sodom push through the cracks. Moving among them, the dancers embody a grounded presence, reimagining a more intimate, reciprocal relationship with the land.

The film will premiere at Fonderie Darling on September 11 and will be featured in the exhibition The Matriarch: Unravelled Threads, curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi for MOMENTA Biennale.