Afrodescendant Artivism Across Europe: A Roundtable with Tania Adam, Raquel Lima, Kiyémis, Wendy Baonga, and Charline Kanza

© Anna Oswaldo Cruz

Tania Adam is a researcher, writer, and curator. Founder of Radio África, a cultural platform dedicated to critical thinking and the dissemination of Black art and culture, her work explores archiving, colonial memory, genealogies and the forms of imagination and resistance in Black identity. Through curatorial projects, public programmes, publications and radio, she develops a critical discourse surrounding the African diaspora, archiving, and the processes of symbolic restitution. Situated between cultural research and artistic creation, her work is aimed at expanding the ways of narrating, listening to, and representing Black experiences in the Iberian and global contexts. She is the author of Voces Negras: una historia oral de las músicas populares africanas [Black Voices: An Oral History of African Popular Music]. She is currently director of the Archivos Negros [Black Archives] project, and since 2022 she has led the research project España Negra. Viaje hacia la negritud en el space-time [Black Spain: A Space-Time Voyage toward Blackness], and she is the coordinator of the Iberian Black Studies Group. Her piece Orogenia Panafricana [Pan-African Orogeny] is currently on display as part of the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (MACBA, through 6 April 2026). In addition, she is an associate professor with the Faculty of Communication at Pompeu Fabra University and a teacher for the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at the MACBA.

© Adeline Rapon

Kiyémis is a writer, poet and Afro-feminist whose work explores joy as a political act and healing as a way of life. Winner of the 2024 Régine Deforges Prize for her debut novel Et, refleurir, she is also the author of the collection À nos humanités révoltées, the anthology Pour la joie (Les Liens qui Libèrent) and the essay Je suis votre pire cauchemar (Albin Michel), which questions beauty standards and the expectations placed on Black women. She is part of a generation of writers of African descent who connect the body, memory and care through a voice that is both radical and luminous. Invited to numerous cultural institutions in France and abroad — from the Palais de Tokyo to the Gaîté Lyrique, from the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (Bozar) to Geneva — Kiyémis develops a transdisciplinary poetic body of work, at the crossroads of literature, Black feminism and the visual arts. She also leads writing workshops that combine pleasure, transmission and the reappropriation of language, thereby extending her exploration of the creative power of women’s voices.

© Estella Valente

Raquel Lima is a poet, art educator, performer, essayist, curator and transdisciplinary artist. She has a degree in Artistic Studies and she is a PhD candidate in Post-Colonial Studies. Her research focuses on orature, slavery and Afrodiasporic movements, and she co-organized the Conference Afroeuropeans: Black In/Visibilities Contested (ISCTE, 2019), and co-edited the book Afroeuropeans: Identities, Racism, and Resistances (Routledge, 2025). She has presented her academic work at various international conferences, most notably the Conference Authoring Human Rights in West Africa and beyond: Expressions of slaveries in Literature and the Arts at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana (2023), and the Conference Decolonial Remains: Scrutinizing African Studies in Africa and the Unfinished Business of Decolonization at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (2022). In 2022, she was invited to the Venice Biennale as a speaker at the event Loophole of Retreat, invited as keynote speaker to the opening session of the World Congress of Women in Mozambique, and invited to the event Literature Talk: Poets from Black Europe at BOZAR in Belgium. In 2023 she was invited to the 35th São Paulo Biennial, curated the Conference Reformulating Authority and Authorship in the Arts in Lisbon, and was elected one of the 100 most influential Black personalities in Lusophony by Bantumen magazine’s annual Power List. In 2024 she was invited as a keynote speaker to the Race in Iberia Symposium at The Ohio State University. She published the poetry books Ingenuidade Inocência Ignorância and ÚLULU and co-founded The Black Union of the Arts in Portugal.