Project a Black Planet: il panafricanismo al MACBA
- Redazione
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MACBA inaugurates its thirtieth anniversary with Project a Black Planet. The Art and Culture of Panafrica, an ambitious exhibition that places the global reach of Pan-Africanism back at the center of the conversation.
Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Antawan Byrd, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the exhibition runs until 6 April 2026 and proposes a historical and critical journey through one hundred years of cultural, political, and artistic practices.
More than five hundred objects — artworks, documents, posters, books, recordings, and popular media materials — trace the impact of Pan-Africanism on the sociopolitical transformations of the twentieth century and beyond: from the World Wars to the Spanish Civil War, from anti-colonial struggles to civil rights movements. In this installation, documentary testimony stands on equal footing with artistic production: posters, newspapers, and pamphlets hold the same interpretive value as paintings or installations.
The project is the result of an international collaboration involving the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels, and MACBA. After its premiere in Chicago, the exhibition arrives in Barcelona — inaugurated with a curatorial conversation on 5 November — and will later travel to the Barbican in 2026. Each stop reshapes the presentation by integrating new archives and local perspectives.
At MACBA, the exhibition is enriched by three previously unseen archival collections: materials that reveal early-twentieth-century interpretations of Africa and the diaspora; the extensive archive of the Chimurenga platform; and the Pan African Orogeny archival project by Tania Safura Adam, which connects Pan-African histories with the contemporary history of Spain and Catalonia. Of particular significance is the reconstruction of Black presences in 1930s Barcelona — artists, intellectuals, and communities that gathered around jazz and boxing — underscoring the city’s long-standing role as a crossroads of Black internationalism.
The exhibition organizes its materials into thematic clusters — from Garvey and the building of autonomous Black worlds, to Négritude, quilombismo, and spiritual and performative practices — offering a transnational and transhistorical map of interlinked struggles and imaginaries. The accompanying publication, Pan-Africa. Art and Political Imaginaries for the Construction of a Black Planet, expands the interpretive lens with historical texts and contemporary reflections.
Project a Black Planet is not merely a retrospective: it is an invitation to rethink global history through the cultural practices of the African diaspora. At MACBA, the exhibition becomes a tool to reread the past and reimagine a shared future, reminding us that Pan-Africanism is a living, plural, and deeply urgent movement today.
MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
Date
6 novembre 2025 - 6 Aprile 2026
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