Johny Pitts — Black Bricolage

In the second part of the season, MEP Studio welcomes the British artist Johny Pitts. The exhibition“When I first heard it, it encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated: Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or black-other.

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That being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant”.— Johny Pitts, Afropean Black Bricolage brings together photographs, notebooks and documents that bear witness to Black experiences in Europe and beyond, between 2004and 2024. From Paris to Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow,Lisbon, Rome, Marseille and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to newer work that includes images made in Freetown, Salvador Bahia and the US deep South, Johny Pitts illuminates Afro-European and Afro-diaspora realities that are often made invisible or poorly represented. His approach refuses both nostalgia and stereotype, but rather favours the ordinary: informal conversations, cafés, community centres, daily commutes, living spaces. His work is built through proximity, listening and exchange, in the company of workers, activists, musicians, educators, students and researchers alike. Pitts’s hauntological gaze connects each city he visits to its colonial past, its history and its present. This is not a bird’s-eye view, but a collection of fragments, patiently assembled through encounter

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A writer, filmmaker, photographer, and journalist, Johny Pitts (born in 1987; lives and works in London) has developed a major body of work around Afropean identity, a concept describing the experience of being Black and European. From London to Lisbon, via Brussels and Berlin, he encounters Afrodescendant communities and brings back images of formal and documentary power.The recipient of several distinctions, including the Decibel Penguin Prize and the ENAR (European Network Against Racism) Award, he has presented solo exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2023 and at Foam in Amsterdam in 2020. His work is also part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.