Notes on Pan-African Orogeny
Tania Safura Adam
Pan-African Orogeny is a presentation of Tania Safura Adam’s evolving research and archive as part of the MACBA exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.
In this podcast, we explore its constellation of documents through a series of audio segments –written and read by Tania Safura Adam herself– that allow a kind of situated listening. In note form, Tania traces a topography of ideas, struggles, and tensions that run like a thread through this “complex ideological polyphony”: from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War and Pan-Africanism, by way of Black workers, to the Tricontinental Conference (1966) and in the African diasporas in Spain.
Pan-African Orogeny is an ongoing process and gesture of gathering voices, documents, and eras, which takes the form of a mural of collective memory in the exhibition space. It is an archive of 20th-century Pan-Africanism that functions as a visual geography of historical encounters and recounts the forging of Black consciousness through ideas, struggles, and print culture.
In an orogeny, tectonic plates collide and push up mountains, while here it is ideas that collide, giving rise to a network of magazines, manifestos, and cultural and political movements linked to Panafricanism across the globe. As Tania puts it, the archive is “a political act. It is not nostalgia. It is an active memory. It is not a dead repository, but organised resistance.”
With the support of
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.