Festival of Afro-European Arts, Performance & Scholarship, 4 & 5 June 2024

This festival celebrates Black cultural production and critical inquiry and seeks to explore the structures that make Blackness seem natural, self-evident, and variously foreign across Europe.

At UCL, this concludes the 2023-24 [Black Europe] speakers’ series, which has aimed to challenge the notion of Europe as a white space, and to highlight the gaps in studies of race in Europe and in colonial contexts.

At SOAS, this festival caps off the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies’ speakers and film series Artistic Activism and Solidarity in an Age of Borders and Hostile Environments.

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Programme

TUESDAY 4 JUNE 2024

Black History Walk

10am - 12pm.

What Black Histories are there to be found in Bloomsbury?

Featuring Tony Warner's award-winning Black History Walks, we will be providing a walking tour of Black History Bloomsbury.

Leaving Eurafrica: Critical Reflections on the Elasticity of Modernism

SOAS Wolfson Lecture Theatre, 3pm - 4:30pm

Can the lens of continental African scholarship and Afropean thought provoke new pathways for challenging Eurocentric frames and perspectives on the modern?

Organised and chaired by Bea Gassmann de Sousa (UCL), featuring Kate Cowcher (University of St Andrews), Christine Eyene (Liverpool John Moores University & Tate Liverpool), author Emmanuel Iduma and George Kyeyune (Makerere University).

Embodiment through dance

The Place, Founder's Studio, 5pm - 7pm

How can choreographic practice shed light on Black / African / Afro-European identities in Europe?

Performance, video extracts and panel discussion convened and chaired by Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach (UCL) with performer, dramaturge and academic Funmi Adewole (De Montfort University) and choreographer Seke Chimutengwende. Framed by the 20-min performance The Blind Side by Funmi Adewole.

Reception

SOAS Cloisters Upstairs, 7:30pm onwards

We welcome you to join us for an evening reception and networking.

WEDNESDAY 5 JUNE 2024

GO/CO-CREATE [for students only]

UCL Haldane Room and Gordon Square (16-18), Room 101, 5pm - 6pm

How can students respond creatively to the work of artists or scholars who interrogate Black or African identities in Europe? What questions will they ask, and what visions will they create?

Masterclass with Mary Evans (Director of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art) and dancer-filmmaker Candace Scarborough.

Performance and critique through film

UCL Haldane Room, 6:30pm - 8pm

How can Blackness and marginalisation as experienced across centuries be performed and visualised through film? To answer this we will be screening short films, including blak mistrys by Candace Scarborough and the premiere of the UCL-produced Hearing Ghosts: The Life & Times of Josephine Morcashani by Graham Riach and Jeff Bowersox. We will also feature a performance by Helen McDonald. Discussants will include Jane Kingsley-Smith (Roehampton), Duncan Salkeld (Chichester), and Jeff Bowersox (UCL).