As the Centre Pompidou was about to close in the autumn for a five-year renovation, it welcomed one of its last exhibitions on the sixth floor, the highly anticipated Paris Noir: artistic circulations and anti-colonial struggles, 1950–2000 (hereafter Paris Noir). The exhibition ambitiously planned to retrace the trajectories of about 150 African, Caribbean and African-American visual artists who connected in Paris, bringing together multiple cultural backgrounds, artistic traditions and political struggles. The show spans half a century. Lead curator Alicia Knock, together with associates Eva Barois De Caevel, Aurélien Bernard, Laure Chauvelot and Marie Siguier, have put together over 350 multi-media pieces spread over 2,000 square metres, including installations specifically commissioned from artists Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy-Fiévee, Jay Ranvier and Shuck One.

Paris Noir is the first exhibition of this scale and richness dedicated to Black artists in a French national gallery. As stated in its catalogue’s preface, it sheds light on the fundamental role Paris has played as a ‘Pan-African and transatlantic crossroads of artistic and intellectual communities’.Footnote ¹ By showing such a wide and diverse range of artists, Paris Noir wants to operate as a tool of resistance, memory and education, filling the gaps left in archives and places of celebration and commemoration, due to a long history of institutional marginalization.

Paris Noir seems perfectly aligned with the Centre Pompidou’s stated ambition of being a place of inter-disciplinary dialogues and encounters beyond artistic, social and geographical boundaries. Paris Noir follows on from other major Pompidou exhibitions connecting Paris to the rest of the world, such as Paris-New-York (1977) and offers new axes of reciprocal circulations: Paris-Dakar, Paris-Lagos, Paris-Fort-de-France etc. Paris Noir also echoes shows that slowly began to put emphasis on non-Western artistic practices (Magiciens de la Terre, 1989; Africa Remix, 2005) and continues the work started in the 2015 Modernités Plurielles exhibition, which shed light on African and Caribbean contributions to Modernism, as well as the 2021 ‘Africa Season’ of Chimurenga Library project held at the BPI [Bibliothèque Publique d’Information]. Interestingly, Paris Noir was showing at the same time as another important exhibition on Arabic art – Présences Arabes. Art moderne et décolonisation, Paris 1908–1988 (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 5 April–25 August 2025).Footnote ²

Paris Noir therefore seems to be part of a broader reconsideration of contributions by non-Western artists to the French cultural landscape. This reappraisal is all the more welcome in a context of general slowness, shyness and even reluctance by French national institutions to address topics connected with racism and the legacies of colonialism. Paris Noir is also significantly taking place at a time when other cultural productions are putting forward colonial legacies in the mainstream. Documentary film Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop, 2024), focusing on the restitution of Benin Bronzes held by French museums, and biopics on Franz Fanon (dir. Jean-Claude Barny, 2024; dir. Abdenour Zahzah 2024) are particularly encouraging examples.

Paris Noir begins in the early 1950s – the starting point of the show being the 1947 creation of the Présence Africaine library, publishing house and journal – and ends in the 1990s, marked by the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Visitors navigate an extremely rich – and sometimes slightly overwhelming – history covering a wide range of themes and episodes. These include the development of Négritude and Pan-African thinking, transnational solidarities between Europe, Africa and the Americas and growing criticism against institutional racism in France, with references to evolving intellectual and artistic practices. Fourteen chrono-thematic sections are articulated around a central coil dedicated to Édouard Glissant and his ‘All-World’ theory,Footnote ³ the circularity of which echoes the ocean-disk motif of the Black Atlantic.Footnote ⁴ However, this spiral-shaped layout sometimes feels more like a maze, navigating imbalanced thematic blocks that go back-and-forth in time. For instance, specific sections on Jazz or memories of slavery happen quite late in the exhibition, even though they have already been mentioned and problematized several times before that. The section themes constantly move from political and intellectual thinking to more technical artistic considerations – with a repeated focus on Abstraction. Paris Noir nonetheless produces an exceptionally rich and valuable overview of the intertwining of artistic and political concerns in Paris, at the crossroads of several continents.

Visitors are welcomed into one of the most striking and complete sections of the whole show, introducing them to Paris as a privileged place of Pan-African circulations in the post-war period. This first room has a programmatic dimension, featuring many elements to be found again and again throughout the exhibition. A floor-to-ceiling collage presenting Présence Africaine, founded in 1947 by Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop, opens the exhibition and stresses the importance of specific locations to the development of an international Black consciousness. A particularly notable mention is made to Suzanne Roussi-Césaire’s involvement in the Négritude movement and the forging of a Martinican identity. This reference is all the more appreciated in a history of persisting marginalization of Black women artists and intellectuals. This opening reference hints at a particular emphasis on women throughout the exhibition – but although quite an effort has been made in this direction, women remain a minority in the whole show. This opening section immediately displays a great variety of nationalities – with artists such as Roland Dorcély from Haiti, Skunder Boghossian from Ethiopia, Paul Keene from the United States and Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria. We also meet two artists to be followed all throughout the show, with a sculpture by Agustin Cárdenas (Cuba) and five paintings – including a portrait of James Baldwin – by Beauford Delaney (US). Baldwin is another central figure of this room, and his call for resistance taken from Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970) – ‘The world will change because it has to change. The party is over. That’s what is going to happen’ – welcomes visitors in a video installation about Black American exiles in Paris. This first room also gives a taste of the diversity of materials to be shown, with a mix of paintings and installations by Gordon Parks and Harold Cousins (US), photographs by Gérald Bloncourt (Haiti) and archive material including issues of Tropiques and Le Musée Vivant. Finally, selected works on brightly coloured walls are another thread to be followed throughout the exhibition, and this section features sixteen collages by Romare Bearden (US, 1981) on a deep red wall.

Visitors then enter the first part of the central space of the exhibition – a dark circular section dedicated to Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. Although the layout of the room is clearly inspired from Glissant’s motif of the ‘All-World’, the specifics of this theory are developed later. This room contextualizes his work and relationship with Cárdenas, featuring some beautiful burnt wood sculptures. The words of Léon Gontran Damas accompany the crossing of this small, dark section, in a film directed by Sarah Maldoror, described as the first Black woman film-maker of Guadeloupean descent. At this point, we also catch a first glimpse of Valérie John’s mesmerizing blue installation.

The next three sections seem to be dealing more specifically with in-depth analyses of artistic traditions and art history landmarks. ‘Paris as a School’ focuses on a double dynamic of education in and subversion of classical European history – exemplified by a quote from Iba N’Diaye (Senegal): ‘Classical painting taught me a lot, but so did the Fauves … Their palette spoke to what I brought from Africa’. Délire et Paix (1954), a massive ink-on-cotton-and-canvas by Georges Coran (Martinique), perfectly illustrates a combination of classical art references and Caribbean culture. The colourful and somehow dreamlike jungle motifs may remind visitors of mediaeval tapestries, and the two central feminine figures are clear subversions of the famous painting Gabrielle d’Estrées et l’une des ses soeurs.

These colourful and somehow phantasmagorical pieces are a good introduction to the next section, dedicated to ‘Afro-Atlantic Surrealism’. This section is a prime example of the importance given to Caribbean artists in the show, and focuses on the role played by Cuba as a crossroads of African and American influences. Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam is particularly praised for bringing an ecological dimension to Surrealism through his use of anti-colonial totemism and nature-based iconography. It is therefore somewhat regrettable that only a single work by him, Umbral (1950) is shown in the entire exhibition. The works of two other Cuban artists, Agustin Cárdenas and Guido Llinás, also shed light not only on borrowing from mythological traditions, but also on historical elements – Llinás’s paintings referring to Cuban secret societies. Stories of resistance feeding into artistic practices are also portrayed through multiple references to stories of Maroon slaves, another leitmotiv of Paris Noir.

‘The Leap into Abstraction’ continues the narrative of the two previous rooms by showing how Abstraction practised by Black artists was born out of revisiting certain aesthetic traditions – with particular references to Abstract Expressionism, and the Jazz practice of collage and improvization. This section is one of the biggest of the whole show, with an extremely rich and dense selection of materials. Visitors enter it after passing in front of a massive yellow wall covered with black and white pictures of Christian Lattier (Côte d’Ivoire), Bill Hutson (US), Harold Cousins, James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, Agustin Cárdenas, Gerard Sekoto (South Africa) and Skunder Boghossian, Kelly Williams (US), Paul Keene and Guido Llinás. ‘The Leap into Abstraction’ features many American artists, with paintings (Ed Clark, Herbert Gentry, Larry Potter, Sam Gilliam…), including two flamboyant yellow Delaneys; an impressive sculpture by Richard Hunt; or collages by Sam Middleton. A video installation shows three short clips focusing on Beauford Delaney, Luce Turnier (Haiti) and Iba N’Diaye. This room’s abundant and sometimes disconcerting multiplicity might act as a symbolic re-enactment of the importance this section gives to composite aesthetics, emerging from found material assembled together.

The next section, entitled ‘Paris – Dakar – Lagos’ is one of the most accomplished rooms of the show, reaching an efficient balance in connecting identity politics and artistic practices. ‘Paris – Dakar – Lagos’ presents once again Paris as a transit hub, but this time with a specific focus on Africa. Press archives and iconographic material retell the stories of post-war exhibitions organized by Africa-based European artists, the development of important movements such as the Poto-Poto school, a branch of the Dakar School, or the Shona workshops in Zimbabwe, and the role played by the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar. Several striking pieces illustrate how direct contacts with Africa influenced artistic practices and renewed approaches to colour and symbolism. This section includes two of my favourite works in the entire show. The first is a splendid tapestry by Victoire Ravelonanosy entitled Le Repiquage du Riz à Madagascar (Madagascar, 1960), picturing a woman working in a rice field surrounding by a rich, bright and colourful assembly of plants and animals. The vividness of colours is complemented by the finesse of the technique, further enhanced by the purple background of the wall. A couple of metres from it is another tapestry by Papa Ibra Tall entitled Couple dans la nuit (Senegal, 1965). This monumental piece again combines technical dexterity with bright and colourful symbolism, and seems to borrow from other techniques, such as mosaics, printing and sculpture.

This section also includes two other pieces which are highlights of Paris Noir. The first is an untitled oil painting by Younousse Seye (Senegal, 1972). One of the first women to exhibit in the École de Dakar, she is also known for her contributions to Awa, la revue de la femme noire, and for having pushed Senghor towards including more women in his government. Her painting in this section embodies the combination of her feminist ideals and the reliance on African symbolism and artistic practices, as she includes cowries, shellfish traditionally used by women for divination in many parts of Africa. Younousse Seye was also known to be Ousmane Sembène’s favourite actress, and thus creates a subtle transition towards one of the most importance pieces of the show – an extract from Sembène’s film La Noire de… (1966). Short extracts show a young Senegalese woman, Diouana (played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop) who came to France for work, where she was faced with disillusion and a feeling of loneliness. Striking quotes resonate in the room – ‘Ici ma vie se passe entre ma chambre et la cuisine. Est-ce cela vivre en France ?’ (‘I spend my life here between my bedroom and the kitchen. Is that what it means to live in France?’). Hearing these words at this stage of the exhibition is particularly important, for it is the first explicit moment when Paris stops being presented as a safe haven. The initial opening of the exhibition under Baldwin’s flamboyant gaze, showing France as welcoming American exiles with open arms, could indeed leave visitors with a slight feeling of unease, as this idealistic vision of Paris totally eclipses the rampant racism of the 1960s–70s in France (also documented, to some extent, in the exhibition). Hearing Diouana’s vocal reminder of this situation is therefore all the more welcome. Despite its effort to cover as many topics as possible, Paris Noir does not include a satisfactory section on the French colonial empire, which is only evoked in the broader context of ‘decolonization’. Many references are made to the forms of racism and discrimination that the artists are fleeing, but mention of the struggles they encounter in France happens quite late. In this regard, this extract serves as a nice transition to the next session, which opens with a reference to a dissonance between the development of Pan-Africanism and French racism.

‘Revolutionary solidarities in Paris’ evokes converging struggles for Black artists, intellectuals and activists in Paris, through the mentions of the Algerian War (1954–62), the 1963 Civil Rights March organised by Baldwin in Paris, the May 1967 protests in Guadeloupe, the May 1968 uprisings in France, and the rise of pro-independence movements. From this point on, the sections become slightly less delineated than the previous ones, as they try to stress a multiplicity of events of various natures happening at the same time. The revolutionary ideals fuelling the Paris movements are exemplified through video interviews of two major American anti-racist activists – Malcolm X and Angela Davis. Beauford Delaney’s bright yellow portrait of Marian Anderson (1965), another key figure of the Civil Rights Movement, offers an alternative way of celebrating such figures. The room also combines archives (Tricontinental, Partisans…) and the works of artists who begin to feel familiar (Guido Llinás, Gerard Sekoto…) alongside names that have not yet been particularly visible (Hervé Télémaque from Haiti, Joseph René-Corail aka Khokho from Martinique, or Merton Simpson from the US, with the particularly striking Confrontation II-A, 1968).

We then move to a section dedicated to Jazz and the significant impact it had on artists, both as a symbol of free expression and as a practice combining celebration and resistance, therefore proving a particularly useful tool for performing Black consciousness. Although we are welcomed by a video installation set in front of a breath-taking view of Paris, the exhibition layout gets confusing at this point, and several works seem to suffer from odd setups. Works by Luce Turnier and Zirignon Grobi (Côte d’Ivoire) are hidden in a corner that can easily be missed if visitors watch the video and leave for the next space without turning around. This section feels all the more out of place as it seems to repeat a lot of elements previously mentioned in the numerous references to Jazz in previous exhibits. A special note deserves to be made of the notebooks of American trumpet player Ted Joans.

This space then leads to an even more confusing corridor with three paintings by Beauford Delaney and one by American photographer Emil Cadoo. This space feels like a filling, as it is very unclear which section it belongs to, or if it is intended as a transition.

The next section, ‘Back to Africa’, focuses on the haunting of 1960s-70s Abstractionist expressions through the idea of a ‘return to Africa’, leading to the foundation of several movements. The first is the Negro-Caribbean School in Abidjan, founded by Martinican artists Serge Hénélon and Louis Laouchez. Both have works featured in this section, playing with anthropomorphic symbols and silhouettes – such as Hénélon’s two collages, Personnage en tunique (1974) and Nécessité Intérieure (Expression-Bidonville), 1971–72. The Vohou-Vohou movement, born in Côte d’Ivoire, is exemplified by the Blôlô painting of Ivorian painter Kra N’Guessan (1981), relying on the recovery and assemblage of simple, natural materials such as rope, twine, and cowries. The work of Martinican artist Ernest Breleur is presented through a painting taken from the 1988 series Fwomajé, taking its name from the Fwomajé Group, which claimed to develop distinctly Martinican aesthetics drawing on Africa, pre-Columbian and Voodoo influences and which collaborated with the American Afrocentrist group AfriCOBRA. Two other works from Martinican artists catch the visitor’s eye on a big yellow wall: Le Grand Marronnage by René Louise (1983), and piece blending multiple Pan-African influences and references by Bertin Nivor, entitled La Grande Assemblée Kamite. Que tous les Kamits de la Terre-Mère Kama, de la Diaspora et de l’Au-Delà (les ancêtres) s’unissent pour briser les murs de l’apartheid et libérer l’Azanie (1985).

About halfway through the exhibition, visitors enter the second half of the Édouard Glissant central section, focusing more specifically on technicalities of the ‘All-World’ philosophy. Through references to Glissant’s thinking,Footnote ⁵ video extracts of Victor Anicet describing marooning as a distinctive feature of the Caribbean, and works of Agustin Cárdenas and Henri Guédon (France), the room aims at presenting an ‘All-World’ community of artists embodying the memory of several continents and multiple histories. However, this theoretical development seems to arrive quite late in the exhibition, especially as the ‘All-World’ concept has been central since the beginning. Visitors also catch another glimpse of Valérie John’s installation from another point of view – consisting of open boxes full of objects and archives on the ground, with a hanging installation from the ceiling.

Out of the central section, visitors proceed into yet another room dedicated to Abstractionism – ‘New Abstractions’. The novelty here lies in the focus on African American women artists travelling to Paris from the 1980s, and becoming active participants in a transatlantic dialogue around abstraction. Given the sporadic number of women artists featured from the beginning of the exhibition, this room feels simultaneously like a long-awaited praise of their work, and yet a frustrating regrouping of extremely talented artists. Topics of erasure and self-affirmation take on a different dimension for these artists who were victims of multi-levelled marginalization, and their works probe these topics under a new light. A part of a Faith Ringgold series The Bitter Nest (US, 1988) welcomes visitors with a skilful technical combination of Nigerian Kuba textiles and traditional American quilting.Footnote ⁶ Le Défilé by Afi Nayo (Togo, 1988) offers a monochromatic interrogation about invisibility. Mildred Thompson’s Radiation Explorations 8 (US, 1994) is said to be continuing Delaney’s work on the legacy of Light Abstractions. The room ends with three striking installations – Boîte (Hessie – Jamaica, 1975–76), questioning preservation and memory through the assemblage of discarded material and scraps; Sans Titre (Alex Burke – Martinique, 1978), representing fragmented Caribbean identities through an collection of cases, boxes and small dolls; and Hommage aux Ancêtres Marrons (Élodie Barthélémy – France-Haiti, 1994), an astonishing combination of three triangular shovels with hairdos made of real hair.

The last four sections change slightly in nature, as they become much more multi-media focused – a choice that might reflect the evolution towards more diverse and modern techniques, as well as a way of keeping the public’s attention. ‘Self-Affirmation’ focuses on representations of the Black body in the 1970s and 1980s, continuing the process of challenging perceptions of Paris as a welcoming haven. This room includes paintings (by Max Pinchinat – Haiti, Diagne Chanel – France, Henri Guédon, and Rodrigo Barrientos – Colombia), but most of the visitors’ attention is turned towards other media. A video of Grace Jones singing La Vie En Rose introduces us to this new section. A photographic composition by Gérald Bloncourt and photographs by Ming Smith (US) aim at recreating a sense of the developing imagery of the period and its political undertones. This room also features one of the most spoken-about pieces of Paris Noir – a video installation by Anthony Ramos (US/Cape Verde) entitled Black and White (1975), showing him and his white partner symbolically exchanging skin colours through makeup. This works is said to represent a desire to transcend racial boundaries through a body-painting ritual. Although I found it particularly effective in showing the strength and weight of identity-based stigmas unfolding throughout this slow transformation, I thought it was a shame that nothing really indicated why what Ramos’ partner was doing had to be put into perspective by using blackface. The aim of the work might precisely be to open a discussion about intention, or to provoke discomfort and question these racist practices – but some sort of statement relocating this in a historical and social context might have been useful.

Before moving to the last three sections, visitors are finally rewarded for their long wait by getting to fully discover Martinican artist Valérie John’s breath-taking installation SECRET(S)… RÊVES DE PAYS… FABRIQUE À MÉMOIRE(S)… PALIMPSESTE …, 1998–2025. This interactive installation made specifically for the exhibition immerses visitors in indigo, the artist’s visual signature, and a colour of historical significance for Africa and the Caribbean due to its connection with slavery. The installation features boxes full of keepsakes, books, photographs, and multiple materials accumulated for twenty-seven years, and creates a vast altar in memory of those circulations, connecting Césaire to Senghor, Fort de France and Dakar through Paris, and visitors to the richness of this history.

After that moment suspended in time – and yet fully at the heart of it – we move on to the next session on ‘Rites and memories of slavery’. Although the theme has been recurrent from the beginning of the exhibition, this section focuses on forms of critical re-imagining of Black cultural history since the 1970s, with a specific focus on governmental commemorations as key moments of redefinition and contestation. Celebrations of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 are thus put into perspective with the Haitian revolution, through an audio-visual installation alternating between a 1989 performance of La Marseillaise during bicentenary celebrations and Salif Keïta’s protest song Nou Pas Bouger, also released in 1989. A massive sculptural installation, Marianne et les Révolutionnaires (Ousmane Sow – Sénégal, 1989) combines the memories of both revolutions through a reference to revolutionary leader Toussaint-Louverture. Another point of focus of the room is the 1994 commemorations of the first abolition of slavery, which led many artists to respond to official celebrations by a retelling of stories of Maroons. A striking piece in this regard is the triptych by José Castillo (Dominica) with three panels – Les Cimarrones (1994), Vierge (1993), Saint Georges (1994) – reflecting the cultural syncretism of the Caribbean. The use of the image of St George connects traditional Christian iconography with a reference to Guadeloupean composer Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and combines both a Catholic cross and symbolic attributes of Ogun, one of the protectors of the Rada rite in Vodou mythology.

This syncretic quality is further problematized in the next session, ‘Parisian syncretism’, focusing particularly on late 1980s/early 1990s practices of blending traditional and ritual symbolism with graffiti. Divination (Outtara Watts – Côte d’Ivoire, 1988), is a great example of these practices, combining various materials and techniques (sewing, gluing, layering, papier mâché…) with motifs from Senufo, Baoulé, Bambara and Dogon cultures. The section also includes a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Henri Guédon (1990), showing again how modern, contemporary icons become merged with long-standing practices. Another innovative technique is displayed through three sculptures by Aboudramane Doumbouya (Côte d’Ivoire) – Le Village (1988), La Case camouflée (1992), Le Fort du Féticheur (1993). Self-portraits by Manuèla Dikoumè (France) and paintings by Everlyn Nicodemus (Tanzania) provide an extra layer of reflection, as they focus on feminine experiences of transmission, belonging and intimacy – although it is once again regrettable that it is presented as a central theme of the section and yet occupies so little space.

The final section of the exhibition aims at drawing ‘A New Black Paris Map’. It focuses on new collective organizations emerging in Paris in the late 1980s/early 1990s, with self-organized initiatives such as the Wilfredo Lam Association or the Revue Noire, and galleries providing new spaces for Black artists (Les Frigos, Hôpitals Ephémères…). One of the most impressive elements of this room is the massive installation Re-Generation 2025 by Shuck One (Guadeloupe), specifically ordered for the exhibition. This work features signature elements of the artist’s practice, known for his ‘political graffiti’. Another important graffiti artist, JonOne (US), catches the viewer’s eye in Bright and Beautiful (Hôpital Ephémère) (1997) and chooses abstraction over a typically figurative graffiti style. Visitors go through several video installations including references to contemporary symbols (including French tennis player and singer Yannick Noah), sculptures by Mickaël Bethe-Sélassié (Ethiopia) and Pascal Kenfack (Cameroon), photographs by Henry Roy (Haiti) and Dorris Haron Kasco (Côte d’Ivoire), and clothes by Lamine Badian Kouyaté (Mali). The exhibition then ends on Fétiche Pascale (Pascale Marthine Tayou – Cameroon, 2011), a totemic sculpture made of piles of copies of Revue Noire, a symbolic reminder of the ongoing abundancy of Black artistic and intellectual production.

In many ways, Paris Noir is a very important exhibition, and its popularity is a very encouraging sign that the public is eager to encounter artists who have traditionally been overlooked by dominant institutions. It is to be hoped that it will also signal to the French government and French cultural institutions that it is high time to face the legacies of colonialism and racism in public institutions. The number of Caribbean artists featured in the exhibition is particularly praiseworthy, as the French public is not accustomed to such representations. However, if Paris Noir does open crucially important doors, the extent of the exhibition does not really allow for in-depth explorations of the ambivalences of French attitudes towards Black people in the second half of the twentieth century. A clear effort was made in putting forward Black women artists – and a significant part of the exhibition’s catalogue is dedicated to intersectional and feminist perspectives; it does, however, lack consistency to fully rehabilitate these artists alongside their male counterparts.

The main criticism that could be levelled at this exhibition probably concerns its overwhelming effect – an unfortunately common complaint about major Pompidou exhibits. This is partly due to a particularly ambitious timeline – a decade of which would have already provided a very rich framework – but also to a confusing thematic selection of sometimes overlapping sections, a rather unclear layout at times, and a combination of artistic, historical and intellectual plans that sometimes produce more confusion than enlightenment. The very commendable idea of having a selection of artists acting as common threads to be followed and encountered all throughout the exhibition (such as Beauford Delaney) unfortunately fails to create a feeling of coherence. We should, however, also bear in mind that the aim of the exhibition is to fill in art historical and institutional gaps, and, as pointed out by Alicia Knock, to do so by telling a transnational history that should not absorb these artists into Western traditions, assign them to fixed and distinct categories, nor provide a unifying discourse that would erase the specificities of their own cultural backgrounds. In this perspective, choosing a layout that departs from traditional, linear and sometimes even teleological narratives is particularly valuable, as it allows for the re-creation of the complexity and diversity of these circulations. The dizzying profusion of artworks and names also symbolically operates as a reminder of the amount of valuable artistic, cultural, and intellectual production that has been ignored by institutions for decades. These choices would have been more impactful had they been stressed more explicitly to give visitors a chance to fully appreciate them. But in many aspects, Paris Noir results from a colossal work of archive-digging and rehabilitation, and plants numerous useful seeds, that hopefully will be picked up on and developed by visitors and other major institutions in the near future.