Morning seminar “Black Urbanities. Black Politics in the City” | Activity
MACBA and CCCB co-organize Black Urbanities. Black Politics in the Citya seminar convening voices from across a variety of disciplines, geographies and political histories to explore collective experiences of Black living in the city.
Black Urbanities. Black Politics in the Citycurated by Abdou Maliq Simone and Asha Bestaims to reflect collectively on the experiences of Black living in the city. This seminar plays with the notion of “black urbanism” as a method for engaging the urban in a different key, a different modality – considering the singular and unparalleled ways in which Black folks continuously prototype new and possible forms of being urban. Exploring everyday urban tactics, global struggles for autonomy, and the practice and potential of Black imagination, we ask what sorts of emergent futures are held in Black districts across the globe, especially in the face of unprecedented political and ecological instability.
Programme
09:30 – 09:45 h
Opening remarks
Asha Best, AbdouMaliq Simone
09:45 – 11:30 h
Architectures for Black Living. Materiality and Extractivism
Urbanity is also a matter of design. A way of using the materials of the earth to construct and inhabit. It is also a way of using the energies, intelligence and creativity of bodies to build and use. How has blackness been deployed to generate specific ways of urban living; how is blackness its own design in counter-distinction of all the designs imposed upon it. What can the earthly and the airborne tell us about black livingness in the face of ongoing extraction and degradation?
11:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m
The Reparative. A Toolbox of Black Urban Practices
Jovan Scott Lewis, Natalia Figueredo, Asha Best, Teresa Caldeira (mod.)
Blackness is always acted upon and rarely with; always curtailed and exhausted, always having to compensate for exploitation and incarceration. But in what ways does blackness circumvent the constraints, use urban physical and social infrastructures to both challenge normative modes of urbanization and to offer and rehearse new forms of living?
09:45 – 11:30 h
Blackness and Being in Urban Europe
More than an exploration of the conditions of black inhabitants in Europe, the question here is how heterogeneous black populations interact with the intricate singularities of European urban landscapes to engender something unprecedented and viable in the face of intense racism.
11:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m
Struggles for Black Autonomy
Lamine Sarr, Mamadou Seydi, AbdouMaliq Simone, Youssef El Maimouni (mod.)
This session will explore the specific tactics and practices deployed by various black associations in Barcelona to open up spaces of autonomous action in an overwhelmingly white city. Without the possibilities of working with extensive economic and political resources, how do black residents, nevertheless, create platforms on which to sustain important values, improve their security and invent new ways of using the city?
participants
in collaboration with
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.
MACBA Thirty
We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.
exhibition
From 6 November 2025 to 6 April 2026
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica
