Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica

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Image courtesy of MACBA.

Although Pan-Africanism has been widely recognized as a major force in twentieth-century global history, until now there has been no major exhibition surveying this movement’s cultural manifestations. Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica takes as its starting point the date of the first Pan-African Congress (1919) and revisits Pan-Africanism as a set of galvanizing ideas: projections of another vision of a world that have yet to be elucidated artistically or considered sufficiently relevant in political terms.  

The exhibition addresses the art of the African diaspora as an aesthetics of back and forth, between the artistic production of the African continent and the proposals of Black communities scattered throughout the world. Artists, writers and other cultural workers have reacted over more than a century to global histories of supremacy, conflict and rupture, including slavery, colonialism and racial discrimination. 

MACBA proposes an itinerary structured around concepts that expand notions such as the foundations of Pan-Africanism, studies of negritude—both as an aesthetic movement and unifier of Blackness—representation, the weight of religious and animist beliefs, and the forms of public protest and anti-racism and civil rights movements.   

The result is a collection of pieces in diverse materials and formats that represent fine arts, music and vernacular or popular cultures from Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe. Visual and sound objects are also shown in dialogue with texts and political manifestos. 

Throughout the exhibition, ephemera—from newspapers and magazines to posters and pamphlets—are of great relevance as they are crucial to understanding the importance of printed and graphic materials in the distribution and formation of Pan-Africanism.

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