'Projecting a black planet': the Macba celebrates its 30th anniversary with the exhibition of the year in Barcelona

BarcelonaThe MACBA first opened its doors on November 28, 1995. This Wednesday marks the start of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations with the opening of the exhibition Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africawhich has been quite an event. It is a monumental and pioneering exhibition on the Pan-Africanist movement, which pursued goals such as international fraternity and solidarity among peoples of African descent. Visitors can see some 300 works of art and about 200 documents and other works created over the last 100 years by some 100 African, European, American, and Latin American artists and intellectuals, from the 1920s to the present.

As Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA and curator of the project along with Antawan I. Byrd, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, says, this project gathers "stories of resistance and recognition experienced by Afro-descendant communities both in the United States and the rest of the world." Before this exhibition, which began its international tour at the Art Institute of Chicago, Pan-Africanism had been studied from the perspectives of literature and politics, and now the curators bring to light its full artistic force. “For us, the key is understanding how this exhibition, which is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art, and this aesthetic have an impact on people’s lives, an impact on the oppressive reality these people lived in, this history of violence, and how they responded through aesthetics and utopian movements,” says Dyangani.

The exhibition will be on view in Barcelona until April 6, and will then travel to the Barbican Centre in London and the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels. At each venue, the curators are seeking connections to the local context. In Barcelona, ​​the anti-fascist struggle of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War is brought to light again through the prologue that the Afro-Caribbean Marxist thinker CLR James wrote for Red Spanish NotebookThe book by the couple formed by the poet and Trotskyist militant Mary Low and the Cuban writer Juan Breá, a product of their trip to Barcelona to join the fight through the POUM during the first six months of the Civil War. "Catalonia leads Spain, and at least for several months, the Catalan workers and peasants, without political experience, thought that the new world had arrived," James wrote. "The flame has been lit and fascism can spill the blood of thousands of workers," the text continues, "it can trample it and even extinguish it for a time. But it will not stop burning underground, it is inextinguishable, and it will reignite."

"Aside from the potential this exhibition has as an artistic project, it gives us the opportunity to foster social cohesion, to break with far-right discourses that fuel difference and racism, and which were already being combated at a very important moment at the beginning of the century," says Dyangani. Another point of connection between the exhibition and Catalonia lies in a new presentation of the Black Files by Tania Safura Adam, consisting of an installation with some 250 more documents where this researcher delves into the impact of Pan-Africanism on the Iberian Peninsula again from the Civil War, with events such as the support that the Lincoln Brigade gave to the Second Republic, because, as Safura Adam states, the African Americans.

A tribute to the Black Virgins

The notion of Pan-Africa dates back to the late 19th century in movements against colonialism and slavery, and during the 1920s it became a transnational movement. The curators do not aim to present a comprehensive history of Pan-Africanism, but rather delve into several specific episodes, one of which is the idea of Africa as an invention, as an empty continent without history, ready to be conquered, along with its population. Later, there are Flags without territoriesas symbols of solidarity that transcend borders.

Another of the exhibition's protagonists is the Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, who advocated for "a worldwide racial solidarity of people of African descent," as can be seen in one of the sections, while others address Blackness as a way of "rethinking civilization through the" final section of the exhibition, which discusses ancestor veneration and agitation and resistance.

Among the works on display are landmarks that immediately catch the eye, such as All my life I have to fight [All my life I've had to fight], by Theaster Gates. It may look like a replica of the caged Moreneta, but it is actually a tribute to Black virgins and women, since the bars come from a closed South Chicago school and the artist uses them as a form of protection. And another of these outstanding works is the sculpture Ndiyafuna, by South African artist Nicholas Hlobo, starring a character whose identity is uncertain; it is unclear whether the sack he is in represents the ancestral customs that consume him, or a womb from which he is born, within a broader reflection on homosexuality and the impact of HIV in Africa.