THE SHIP. University, 2
Colonialism is a very dark page in the history of Europe that the continent seems to ignore when it boasts of its alleged humanistic values.. The exhibition Let’s bring blacks home He tells us, not so much about the history of colonialism, but about the cultural pretexts that were used as an excuse to justify it: that “the savages” were incapable of building stable political communities, who were obsessed with ritual practices, that were not, definitely, rational beings. A whole list of topics that, in the background, They sought to justify slavery and disguise the political and economic interests that encouraged the colonial atrocity in black Africa.. The tour begins with a series of objects and representations (masks, figures, stuffed animals, spears...) that reinforced the cultural stereotypes of African populations to give way to the so-called “human zoos”, fashionable in Europe at the time. This is, the shameful display of black villages so that visitors could see the hypothetical ancestral ways of life, in enclosures—sometimes zoos—prepared expressly for the occasion. The exhibition focuses on the Spanish case, showing images of the Ashanti Villages in Madrid and Barcelona (1897) and of the Fang natives of Guinea at the Valencia Sample Fair of 1942. La Nau dusts off cultural stereotypes that reinforced racism, the one then and the one now. S.M.
