“You only have to see his face to understand that he is a true black man born in the heat—heat of fire—of the African tropics, where the jungle, with its thousand beauties and dangers, makes the life of civilized man impossible.” This is how the article that opens the cover of the magazine begins Something. popular illustration on September 14, 1935, with the enormous close-up of a black child, whose parents “will become intoxicated with fermented drinks manufactured by themselves (…). They will go naked or wear old European-style clothing, perhaps acquired from a profitable traveler (…) not out of modesty, which does not exist in many peoples of inferior culture, but out of vanity or coquetry (…)”.
This document is part of the Black Files, a mixture of materials, both thoughtful and popular, among which there are articles, books, posters, advertisements, and even songs, like that of Cola Cao, all with the common link that they have contributed to denigrate, animalize, make invisible, and, ultimately, to dehumanize the figure of the black man in Spain since the Renaissance, to present it as a failure of the white man. The collection is part of A requiem for humanity, dehumanizations, power and black futurisms, an exhibition inaugurated on Saturday at La Casa Encendida, in Madrid, where it can be seen for free until September 15.
“In a time of racial tension like the current one, it is an invitation to reflect,” says its commissioner, Tania Safura Adam (Maputo, Mozambique, 1979), during a guided tour on Thursday through this small sample, with “sensory” content. The researcher, journalist and founder of Radio Africa, a platform for the dissemination of black art and culture, attributes the current rise of far-right movements and anti-immigration speeches to “a clear defense of white supremacy.”
The exhibition is, therefore, an “invitation to deconstruct this discourse, which is very dangerous,” says Adam. The exhibition occupies two rooms. The first, Dehumanization, where the aforementioned documents are exposed, starts, as Adam explains, from the thesis that this begins in Spain, with imperialism and the Valladolid Controversy, in which Brother Bartolomé de las Casas, in defense of the indigenous Americans, proposes enslave the blacks of Africa.
“Since the transatlantic trafficking, there are instruments of dehumanization, legal, in art, literature, cinema…”, explains Adam, which feed an anti-black world, some as innocent like the story that shows with funny drawings a child rubbing himself in the bathtub “because he doesn’t want to be black.”
In this room you can see Colonial amnesia (stupor), a film by Claudia Claremi (Madrid, 1986), which reconstructs, with images and sounds, the Three Kings Parade of 2020 in the Alicante city of Alcoy. In the parade, a tradition that dates back to 1885, hundreds of young people participate with their faces painted black and their lips red, in a blackface collective that is “perfectly normalized” among the neighbors, describes the director.
Another film being screened is the 1915 classic The birth of a nation, by DW Griffith, technically praised, but controversial for its argument, which defended white supremacy and popularized the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. You can also see the project on video Ils/elles vous re-gardent also, by Sybil Coovi Handemagnon (Paris, 1988), some disturbing busts with an animated gaze, based on images from the phrenological collections of the Museum of Man in Paris, and which, as their title indicates, look back at the visitor. “They question the presence of works resulting from colonial plundering in anthropological museums,” explains the artist.
In the space between this room and the next, the titles of 45 books fill the wall. It is a selection of essays, poetry and prose by black authors from Africa and the diaspora. Start with Story of the life of Olaudah Equiano, The African. Autobiography of a freed slave, in 1789, and ends with The Afro-descendant people, by Quince Duncan, in 2012. In the middle, works by Richard Wright, Tony Morrison, Cheikh Anta Diop and Angela Davis.
![A screening in the Blue Zone of the exhibition 'A Requiem for Humanity', at La Casa Encendida, in Madrid.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/7KNKLCZBTNE2DH37TLOGNSUC24.jpg?auth=9ed15b95ec030d4d97f929a67dd6da381155900cf5e5030e5fb30065c4138c3d&width=414)
Through them, the authors take power through words, and open the way to the second room, Re-humanization, in which audiovisual works are exhibited such as Postcolonial Dilemma, of the artistic collective Kongo Astronauts, and books that fall within the scope of “mythologies, black futurism and science fiction,” describes Adam, which can be read accompanied by the music of Alice Coltrane or Sun Ra.
As a culmination, the visitor can take a copy of The comet, a science fiction story by African-American sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois published in 1920, which speculates on the relationship between a rich white woman and a black man, the only survivors after the fall of a comet in New York. “The black population has always been futuristic, abolitionist movements needed utopian thinking to think beyond,” says the commissioner.
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