Submerged Archives or the Whispering of the Sea
Grada Kilomba, Opera to a Black Venus, 2024. Courtesy of the artist
Held on 12 Mar 2025
In its depths the ocean guards echoes of unwritten stories, the silence of bodies that never reached the shore. An immeasurable, liquid archive, where absences whisper at time. This encounter, curated by Yeison Fernando García López, calls upon a group of participants with different trajectories in the sphere of Afro theory, art and research to consider the sea as a territory of grief, resistance and future, as a space where memories are not erased but, rather, expand in time, waiting to be read. The activity is framed inside the Grada Kilomba exhibition, Opera to a Black Venus. What Would the Bottom of the Ocean Tell Us Tomorrow, if Emptied of Water Today?
With the support of
The Portuguese Embassy Fundación Amigos Museo Reina Sofía
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Yeison Fernando García López , a political scientist, cultural manager, poet and researcher, was born in Cali (Colombia) and grew up in Madrid (Spain), identifying as Afro-Colombian and Afro-Spanish. He curated the 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 editions of the Festival Conciencia Afro (Afro Awareness Festival) and manages the Centro Cultural Espacio Afro, in addition to co-curating Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and participating in the Spanish Pavilion’s Pinacoteca Migrante (Migrant Gallery) at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale with the text “La decolonialidad ilustrada en el contexto español” (Illustrated Decoloniality in the Context of Spain)
José Ramón Hernández es s an Afro-Cuban “interdisciplinary” artist, curator, teacher and cultural manager, and a graduate from the Instituto Superior de Arte de Cuba. He is the founder and artistic and general coordinator of Osikán (Experimental Stage Nursery) and has managed and curated Zona Cero (Creative Experimentation Workshop) since 2010 and Habana Off-Escala 1 since 2017. Moreover, he has collaborated with distinguished Cuban and international artists and collectives, and his creative research explores Afrodescendant rituality, personal and collective memory, “outlying bodies” and the construction of affective cartographies, work with non-fictional documents and strategies of sensitivity to affect and intervene in social processes and in communities.
Rudy Amanda Hurtado Garcés is an anthropologist, researcher, teacher and anti-racist activist who has published a number of academic articles and journalistic and opinion pieces. Her book Insurgiendo ciudadanía: proceso de comunidades negras de Colombia is part of the Biblioteca de Ciencias Sociales Afrocolombiana (Library of Afro-Colombian Social Sciences). Her strands of research include historical ethnography, Black Marxisms, the critical theory of race and ethnicity, historical and comparative sociology, social movements and collective action, Black feminisms, Black, plebeian and popular republicanism, postcolonial theory and historical reparations. Currently, she is the director of the Observatorio de Discriminación Racial (Observatory of Racial Discrimination) and curator of the future Museo Afro de Colombia.
Benia Nsi is a multidisciplinary creator and cultural manager who focuses primarily on community building and the centralisation of spaces of collective listening and storytelling from a queer and transgenerational perspective. She has collaborated with collectives such as In The Wake Lab, the Centro Cultural Espacio Afro and Don't hit a la Negra, and also curated the exhibition Te prensé entre las hojas in the Sala de Arte Joven (Madrid). She holds a degree in Labour Relations and Human Resources from Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) and an MA in Cultural Management from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
Paulo Pascoal is an Angolan, Portuguese-born multidisciplinary artist who has worked in theatre, television, radio and film. Running through his practice are activism, cultural policy and performing arts and, with a degree in Performing Arts and an MA in African Cultural Studies, he mentors resident writers in Hangar-Centro de Investigação Artística and is a co-founding member of União Negra das Artes and curator of the public programme Coro en Rememória de un Vuelo in the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Fundación Calouste Gulbenkian. His latest work of biofiction, the book XPR4xTX, is an instruction manual for moving dissident peoples.
Antumi Toasijé is a historian, writer and visual artist. With a PhD in History, Culture and Thought from the University of Alcalá (2019), he began his doctoral studies in International Relations and African Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2004 and holds a degree in General History from the University of the Balearic Islands (2003). An adjunct professor in Global History at NYU Madrid and a lecturer in non-Eurocentric Global History at IE University, from 2020 to 2024 he was president of the Council for the Elimination of Racial or Ethnic Discrimination (CEDRE) and is currently a Fulbright visiting scholar at Morgan State University (2024–2025). He is also the author of numerous publications and the director of the documentary Panafricano (2025).
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