On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination

The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.

If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.

Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.

The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.

The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts.  Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live. 

Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.

African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.

For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.

These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museum’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.

On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.

African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.

The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.

These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museum from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.