“Arxius negres: fragments d'una metròpoli anticolonial” [Black Files: Fragments of an Anticolonial Metropolis] is an exhibition that reflects on the way we forge collective memories and circulate knowledge when populations live on the margins and don’t form part of the narrative of a city or region, or its representation, and much less the image it projects, because their lives have been silenced and made invisible. Nonetheless, it is when echoes of the past persist and subjugation becomes unsustainable that these lives and the archive in its multiple forms begin to emerge. This materiality is necessary for the history to be constructed, and it becomes the indisputable testimony that aspires to lift the silence of the past and encourage other ways of imagining the future.

This is the history of the Black communities of Barcelona, constantly silenced, even though they have been present in the city for centuries, and more visible through post-Franco immigration processes. Their legacies are appreciable and their materiality faded, because they are not written and, if they are, are in the form of dispersed fragments that need to be rescued, compiled and rewritten.

This exhibition is an exercise in history and writing that seeks to interweave their collective memory, joining together scattered and sometimes interconnected scraps from the political, associative, cultural and domestic spheres, and which operate at the boundaries between formal and informal, legal and illegal, chaos and order. This materiality is fruit of the research carried out by Tania Safura Adam within the framework of ”Espanya negra: viatge cap a la negritud en l'espaitemps” [Black Spain: A Space-Time Journey to Negritude].