The map is nonsense. In one of the first rooms of the exhibition that Macba is dedicating to Pan-African art in recent days, a yellowish sheet of paper found in a Brussels market appears: a 19th century map of Africa that draws a speculative continent, imagined by the European gaze. It is the type of cartography popularized by Aaron Arrowsmith or John Tallis, famous British geographers whose atlases, before the colonial distribution established at the Berlin Conference of 1885, were based more on stories and hypotheses than on actual measurements. There are no states or cities, only spots of color where real regions (Egypt, Nubia, Abyssinia) and invented regions coexist (“Land of the Blacks”, “Country of the Kaffirs”, “Unknown Territory”). Africa appears as a dark and uninhabited space, ready to be conquered. Nothing but a pretence.
Much of Project a black planet. The art and culture of Pan Africa It feels like a response to that map and everything that made it possible. For centuries, explorers, missionaries, ethnographers, and colonial administrators built a monumental archive of the “African” that served primarily Europe’s extractive interests. Against this imaginary, brutal in its symbolic violence, African intellectuals and those of the diaspora rose up in the 1920s, formulating the so-called Pan-Africanism. From it emerged various movements: Garveyism, which advocated global black unity and political and economic self-sufficiency; THE neigritudethat reclaimed black subjectivity against French colonial universalism; Brazilian quilombism, heir of the brown communities, or the various pan-African congresses and festivals of the mid-20th century. They shared the goal of articulating a global black community, endowed with its own historical consciousness and determined to reclaim itself in the modern world.
Like its promoters, the exhibition dismantles the image of that Africa “without history” defended by Hegel – or, much later, by Sarkozy, when he stated in an infamous 2007 speech that “African man has not fully entered history” -, the matrix of a primitive imaginary that has permeated popular culture for decades. Faced with the racist stereotype, the exhibition proposes a non-Western epistemology that combines the need for memory, political project and poetic escape. It is the first major engagement of Macba’s 30th anniversary and is curated by its director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, together with Antawan I. Byrd, Adom Getachew and Matthew S. Witkovsky. The project, born at the Art Institute of Chicago and co-produced with the Barbican in London and the future Center Pompidou in Brussels, marks the “end of the first part” of Dyangani Ose’s mandate, in the words of the director herself, who had been working on the project for years.
In the rooms, almost 500 works and documents from Africa, Europe and the Americas, the three vertices of the triangular trade, are found in a single space of reflection. The exhibition recognizes long histories of slavery, colonialism and resistance, crosses national borders and experiments with futures of equality and shared belonging. The story he proposes is fragmentary and does not proceed chronologically, but rather through episodes that link congresses, riots, festivals, magazines or film fragments with modern and contemporary works of art. It seems to reproduce the open circulation of Pan-Africanism itself: the visitor can enter and exit at multiple points, dates overlap and colonial documents coexist with vinyl records. free jazzposters queer and photographs of communities of African descent in Europe and the United States.
The result stands out for being full of good curatorial choices and encounters between relevant and stimulating works. The first is the initial room, dedicated to flags: the Pan-African tricolor – red for shared blood, black for the emancipation of the continent, green for its fertile land – represents a direct attack on the fetish of the European nation-state, a colonial device that has displaced entire populations from their territories of origin. Artists like David Hammons and Chris Ofili hybridize that banner with the flags of the United States and the United Kingdom to ask who excludes this supposed “union” and to claim forms of transnational belonging for people of African origin. Together with them, the Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt films a flag with very black hair torn by the wind at a point on the coast of Martinique, the site of the slave shipwreck and the tomb of Édouard Glissant, one of the intellectual beacons of this postcolonial present.
For some black thinkers, the Civil War experience fueled “black power” rhetoric and forms of organization.
Another memorable point of the exhibition is the one dedicated to the busts. The sculptures of Simone Leigh, Job Kekana, César Bahia and other African and diaspora artists revisit this ancestral genre to pay homage to community leaders or hybrid figures between the mask and the portrait, sometimes bringing them closer to the codes of the present. Lillian Mary Nabulime places a surgical mask on her bronze statuette, associating an atavistic solemnity with the recent trauma of the pandemic. A review of works which, starting from modern and contemporary languages, have thought of other images of darkness: in the disorder of the exhibition, Adrian Piper, Ernest Mancoba, Ibrahim El Salahi, Charmaine Spencer, George Pemba Sekoto, Colette Oluwabamise, the fabulous portraits of Zanele Muholi, the disturbing Albino by Marlene Dumas or the panels of The art of the Negro by Hale Woodruff, Pan-African Art History Mural.
Another strong point is the work on the dossier. WEB Du Bois statistical diagrams of the black population in Georgia, along with a copy of The souls of the black people – the foundational 1903 essay on the so-called “color line” – restored Pan-Africanism to its status as an insurgent social science. Magazines like Presence AfricaineTHE Black Anthology by Nancy Cunard and covers of Ebonythe great illustrated magazine of the African-American middle class. In these intersections there is also the Pan-African orogenesis by Tania Safura Adam, who reads pan-Africanism as a tectonic drift that also passes through Spain and its colonial forgetfulness in Morocco and Guinea.
The exhibition distances itself from the African-American focus it had in Chicago to give another color to the journey. The wise man Pagan Spain by Richard Wright, Langston Hughes’ poem dedicated to the Lincoln Brigade and the wave of solidarity with the Second Republic inscribe Spain in a memory that is almost always told without it. For some black thinkers, the Civil War was the first laboratory in which to put anti-fascist and anti-colonial internationalism into practice. From this was born an experience of a common front and a politicized militia which would fuel the rhetoric and forms of organization of the black power.
Another connection with the local landscape, more veiled and mischievous, is found in the work of Theaster Gates, who modeled the figure of Black Madonna in European archives to build an alternative genealogy of Marian iconography. The artist presents the sculpture All my life I have to fight (2019), an altar where a black virgin appears in a cage, titled after a line by Kendrick Lamar that Oprah Winfrey uttered in The color purple. Although the artist is not entirely aware of it, in the Catalan context his work functions almost as a critical intervention on Moreneta: the disengagement from her common devotional context to inscribe her in a broader history of black icons.
It’s the start of an unbeatable final stretch in plastic. Inside there is an oil painting by Wifredo Lam, lent by the Reina Sofía; the textile work of Sonia Gomes, made of fabrics stitched together like scars; the canvases of Iba N’Diaye, where modern painting competes with historical violence; the colorful sarcophagi of Ebony G. Patterson; the clay figures of Moataz Nasr, where anonymous crowds seem about to rise up, and the powerful Murderers! Murderers! of Kader Attia, a wall of doors and megaphones that seems to evoke the great movements against state violence.
For its ambition and focus, this could be one of the exhibitions of the year, although it is not without its reservations. The tendency towards an almost sanitized austerity that Meier’s building seems to impose on everything and which perhaps takes away a bit of emotion from the whole still weighs heavily. In any case, it is a minor nuance in an exhibition that has the merit of putting into circulation, from the centrality of an institution like this, a theme and a discussion that is little explored in Spanish museums. And it leaves gaps, opens questions and functions as a first chapter waiting for others to pick up the baton with new investigations of the same scope. Will there be candidates?
«It projects a black planet. The art and culture of Pan Africa’. Macba. Barcelona. Until April 6, 2026.
