Room 20

The slogan “The African Is at the Center” is used by the communities that organize Madrid’s Conciencia Afro festival and it encapsulates the need for visibility, cultural recognition, and anti-racism with respect to the African diaspora and the Black communities in Spain. This section presents a selection of practices that recognize the diversity of a minority population in Western countries but whose cultures are celebrated in places such as Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. It brings together a number of aesthetic reflections on the identity of those of African descent, expressions of the Black political body, and the affirmation of social presences that are the result of centuries of colonization. 

Alongside Pocho Guimaraes’s pioneering voice and Agnes Essonti’s photo-essay, Rubén H. Bermúdez’s Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? (And You, Why Are You Black?) represents a fundamental work in Spanish art. Departing from an experience in the artist’s personal biography, the work arrives at the need to recognize Blackness as a collectively constructed condition. It is a device for making a story one’s own, but it is also an educational weapon aimed at racialized audiences, a tool for empowerment that places the culture of those of African descent at its center.