Archivos Negros: O Poder da Matéria
July 17th, 2025
18h
Hangar – Centro de Investigação Artística
Free Entry
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995): “The monopoly on the production of history has collapsed: anyone can generate written or audiovisual content about the past.” Furthermore, I would add, “the archive is a decisive element” in this production. Revisiting the past requires the use of archives and official records, without forgetting that these always reflect power relations; when they are created, when they are used and when they are valued and used [1]. Jacques Derrida said that “There is no political power without control of the archive […] Effective democratization is always measured by this essential criterion: participation in and access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation” [2]. On the other hand, archives are not passive repositories of old materials, but places where social power is negotiated, questioned and confirmed, in the words of archivist and academic Saidiya Hartman, “The archive is a living, moving thing, whose sources change as we speak” [3].
The session will present how the proposal Archivos Negros (Barcelona, Spain) takes on this complexity and the perversion of the tool. How memory is not something that is found and collected in archives, but is constantly made and remade, where the concept of truth is systematically in crisis. Also presented is the planning for the research 24/20 Black Retornad (Hangar, 2025).
[1] Joan M. Schwartz e Terry Cook. Archivos, registros y poder: de la teoría (posmoderna) a la performance (archivística). Archivar. La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. 2017.
[2] Jacques Derrida, Mal de Archivo. 1997
[3] BlackArchive Edition. Boston Ujima Project
Tania Safura Adam (Maputo – Mozambique, 1979). She is a curator, researcher and founder of Radio Africa, a laboratory for critical thinking and the dissemination of black arts and cultures. Based in Barcelona (Spain), her research explores black diasporas in the Iberian Peninsula through images, literature, popular culture and historiography, and studies African societies through their popular music.
Curator of “Black Archives: Fragments of an Anticolonial Metropolis” (Manifesta 15, 2024). A Requiem for Humanity: Dehumanizations, Power and Black Futurisms (La Casa Encendida, 2023 – 2024), “Microhistories of the Diaspora. Embodied experiences of female dispersion” (La Virreina, 2018-2019). In 2016, she was responsible for the program of activities for “Making Africa: A continent of contemporary ‘design’” (CCCB, ICUB).
Since 2022, she directs the research project “España Negra. Viaje hacia la negritud en el espacio-tiempo” (Museo Reina Sofía-Artium- CCCB- IVAM, 2023-2024 /MACBA-CCCB, 2025). Coordinated the seminar on Iberian Black Studies of the Program of Proprietary Studies of the Reina Sofia Museum (2023-2024). She is currently part of the team of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) of MACBA.
In 2024, she founded “Archivos Negros”, an eclectic repository of books, records, posters, newspaper articles, letters, speeches, songs and folk tales, drawings and caricatures, images of statues and monuments, vernacular photographs, archives, records, contracts, registers and other sources that reaffirm black existence in Spain from the 15th century to the present day.
She writes articles in different media and participates in different publications with her essays and poems. He has just published the catalog “Archivos Negros: Fragmentos de una metrópoli Anticolonial” and the essay “Voces negras: An oral history of African popular music” (Malpaso, 2024).
Since 2017, he has presented the Radio Africa program on betevé. He presented the television talk show Terrícoles (2017-2019) and African Bubblegum Music on Primavera Sound Radio (2019).