Installations
From the 8th of September to the 24th of November, Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana presented a comprehensive programme featuring installations, archives and performances by the participants of the edition.
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Arxius Negres: Fragments of an anticolonial metropolis
- TypeExhibition
- ParticipantTania Safura Adam
- VenueGustavo Gili
Arxius Negres: Fragments of an anticolonial metropolis, Exhibition view 2024 © Tania Safura Adam. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / Ivan Erofeev
Arxius Negres: Fragments of an anticolonial metropolis is a presentation that reflects on how we forge collective memories and circulate knowledge about and amongst populations when they live on the margins and do not form part of the narrative or representation of a city or region, much less its projection, since their lives have been silenced and made invisible. In a present in which the echoes of the past are unceasing and subjugation is no longer sustainable, lives begin to emerge and the archive, in its multiple formats, constitutes the materiality necessary to construct history, becoming the indisputable testimony that aspires to break the silence of the past and foster other ways of imagining the future.
This is the story of Barcelona’s black communities, constantly silenced, but present for centuries in the metropolis, and more visibly so as a result of the immigration process in the post-Franco period. The materiality of their considerable legacies has faded, either because nothing has been written down or because the documentary evidence exists in the form of scattered fragments that need to be retrieved, compiled and rewritten.
This presentation is an exercise in history and writing that strives to weave together the collective memory by drawing together sometimes disparate fragments that are scattered across the political, associative, cultural and domestic spectrums, and which operate in the border zones between the informal and the formal, the lawful and the illicit, the chaotic and the ordered. Together, they constitute a materiality in the framework of Black Spain: Journey towards blackness in space-time, a laboratory led by Tania Safura Adam that reflects on the black experience. Over the course of three years, an eclectic repository of microhistories, documents, artistic works, images, sound and film recordings and hitherto invisible archives, as well as books, comics, photographs, albums, videos and magazines has been generated.
Analogous to the Manifesta 15 conceptual framework, the presentation is structured in three parts: Cure and Care, Imagining Futures and Balancing Conflicts, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of black existence in this part of the world. The first part consists of a historiographical and testimonial rereading of the metropolis. The second part reinforces the idea of a black archive under construction that breaks with unilateral historicity, shaping an unexpected social and intellectual memory. Finally, the third part fills the gaps and silences that exist in the racist and colonial narrative of the city regarding its past, as well as connecting the spheres in which confrontations arise that affect quotidian, artistic and political practices.
For Manifesta 15, Tania Safura Adam presents the newly-commissioned archival project Arxius Negres: Fragments of an anticolonial metropolis.
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