The City Council of Granada is organizing the exhibition “Black Memory: Portraits of Afro Figures in the History of Spain”, to be held at the Sala de Cristales of the Zaidín Civic Centre from 14 to 31 October 2025, in collaboration with Granafrik and the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Granada.
The event is part of the European project Global-ANSWER. The project’s main goal is to build an international and intersectoral network for comparative and collaborative research and training in the field of social work and human mobility. The initiative involves universities, municipalities, and third-sector organizations in Spain, Italy, and Sweden.
According to Justo S. Fernández, project coordinator at Granafrik, “Black Memory seeks to make visible, through photography and painting, the contributions of Black and Afro-descendant people to Spanish history and society.” The exhibition also aims to challenge the lack of representation of Afro figures in historical narratives and encourage a dialogue between past and present.
The exhibition will open on Friday, 17 October, at 6:00 p.m., with a talk by researcher Antumi Toasijé, whose doctoral thesis inspired the exhibition, along with a live music and tasting event. The closing session will take place on Friday, 31 October, at 6:00 p.m., featuring storyteller Boni Ofogo.
As Antumi Toasijé explains, “the persistent myths about the absence of Black communities in large periods of Spanish history have fostered an exoticized and fragmented view of their presence. To recover our historicity, it is necessary to rescue and study the biographies of Afro figures from Spain’s past.”
“Black Memory” thus invites visitors to rethink history from an inclusive, critical, and plural perspective, acknowledging the Afro-descendant legacy as an integral part of Spanish and European identity.