Public programming: Salma Mochtari / Sound and editing: Louis Pierre-Lacouture / Camera: Vincent Peugnet / Translation and subtitles: Zsófia Szatmári / Production: Cindy Bannani, Salma Mochtari and Sophie Potelon for KADIST
How do we make Black archives within western contexts? In this roundtable discussion, representatives from Afropea (France), Black Cultural Archives (UK), the Black Queer Archives (Netherlands) and Black Archives Sweden will discuss their various approaches to autonomy, infrastructure, economics, and sustainability in creating and maintaining Black archives within Europe.
This public program accompanies Nectar, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, now on view at our Paris location. During the past two years, we have partnered with Afro Charities (US) to commission this new body of work inspired by the historic AFRO American Newspapers Archives. Savannah Wood, director of Afro Charities which manages this extensive collection, will moderate this discussion with the goal of exchanging tools and strategies to create solidarities across cultural contexts.
With Savannah Wood (Afro Charities), Marie-Julie Chalu (Afropea), Rhoda Boateng (Black Cultural Archives), Julian Isena (Black Queer Archives NL), and Ulrika Flink (Black Archives Sweden).
Presentation of the archive initiatives:
Afro Charities builds bridges across generations and socioeconomic divides through artistic and educational projects inspired by the AFRO American Newspapers’ archives. The AFRO Archives include approximately 3 million photographs, several thousand letters, rare audio recordings and other ephemera documenting Black life during the past 130 years. As a nonprofit partner to the AFRO, we help care for the collection, and create meaningful opportunities for our community to engage with this indispensable resource.
Created in 2016, Afropea is an editorial and curatorial platform on Afropean identities and creativities. It documents and analyses them through archives, research of artistic works or postcolonial studies. Influenced by the book Habiter la frontières by Léonora Miano, which introduces us to the word “afropea”, we wanted to document the mental terroir of which she speaks, to make it concrete, to circumscribe it with images, past and present stories. All this to develop a way of speaking to the world through the exploration of the Afro-diasporic being.
Black Cultural Archives is the only national heritage center dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain. Black Cultural Archives grew from a community response to the New Cross Massacre (1981), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984); the underachievement of Black children in British schools, the failings of the Race Relations Act 1976, and the negative impacts of racism against, and a lack of popular recognition of, and representation by people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK.
The founders, including the iconic Len Garrison, came to the conclusion that what was needed was a space where members of the community, especially young people, could find positive representations of themselves in history and culture. This act of self-help expanded into the creation of an ‘archive museum’ that evidenced and painted a more comprehensive picture of Black presence in Britain.
The Black Queer Archives NL is part of the Black Archives in Amsterdam. These archives cover black queer history in the Netherlands and are built with activists and community members from different generations.
Black Archives Sweden is a contemporary archive centered around the experiences and narratives of Afro-Swedes and black people in Sweden. It is a project that approaches the archive as a space of invisibility and erasure, but also a place that holds room for other imaginations, realities, histories and conditions for the future. Moreover, Black Archives Sweden will act as a place and space for meeting, constructive and healing dialogues, learning, where Afro-Swedes’ experiences are always the starting point. It is a place where Afro-Swedes do not need to always exist in opposition or reaction against whiteness, but can exist and create on our own premises.