blackness

Pan-African Orogeny presents an iteration of Tania Safura Adam’s ongoing research and archival work as it unfolds at MACBA, within the framework of the exhibition Projecting a Black Planet. To navigate this constellation of documents, we compiled 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.

In this podcast, architect, curator, and thinker Mpho Matsipa talks about Black urbanism, African mobilities, the uneasy legacies of modernism, racialized ecologies, and the extraction of Black time through regimes of waiting and migration. We also think with Mpho’s reading of Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe’s 'distributed university', where museums, salons, and independent art spaces and networks become infrastructures for redistributing knowledge and resources beyond elite institutions. Above all, we return to the salon –as a space of intimacy, care, and beauty– as an infrastructure for imagining other futures.

In this podcast, queer feminist thinker Neo Sinoxolo Musangi invites us into their spiral of fragmented, present, embodied thought. We talk about writing as performance, about poetry, and about a rigorous orality. We turn our attention to the small, irrelevant stories, silences, and gaps in the archive. And we examine borrowed vernaculars and harmful acronyms, as well as the tensions and overlaps between categories such as queer, Blackness and Africanness–and what it means to think from within them.

In this podcast, sociologist and urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone talks at length about blackness as doubleness, structural neglect, fragmented opportunities, collective minds, extended urbanisation and Sao Paulo's PCC as an interesting case study. Through these ideas, he invites a reconsideration of urbanism as a field shaped less by fixed structures than by the ongoing, relational labor through which inhabitants inhabit that intersticial middle space.