they won't budge

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Program in Africana Studies
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
41 East 11th Street, 7th Fl, NY, NY 10003


PRESS RELEASE

THEY WONT BUDGE: AFRICANS IN EUROPE
(A photographic exhibition on migrations and immigrations)

New York University’s program in Africana studies, led by director Awam Amkpa and a curatorial team consisting of Annalisa Butticci and Madala Hilaire, presents a photographic exhibtion on recent African migrants and the reinvention of Black diasporic communities in Europe. Over 100 photographs and videos from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Czech and Britain, follow some remarkably resilent immigrants on their uncertain sojourn on makeshift, intermittently powered fishing boats from West Africa, through the rigors of European immigration control, into the interstices of European society. These works of art are created by award winning photographers, photo-journalists, and human rights activists all over Europe including Juan Medina (Spain), Alfredo Muňoz de Oliveira (Portugal), Francesco Cocco, Angelo Aprile, Elisa Cozzarini, Marco Ambrosi, Matteo Danesin, Aldo Sodoma and Stefano Renna (Italy). We also included selected photos courtesy of agency Fotogramma (Milan) and AGNfoto (Naples). Their remarkable photographs capture Europe’s postcolonial residents – old and young, male and female, healthy and disabled, Pentecostal Christians, Coptic Christians and Muslim Murid, as they negotiate their citizenship within and against multiple political and cultural spaces. Vivid, intimate, and often unexpected, these images portray the many ways in which Africans claim migration and communal recreation as fundamental human rights.
The title “They Won’t Budge” is derived from Salif Keita’s song “We Won’t Budge” which was adopted by Manthia Diawara as the title of a celebrated book on Africans in Europe. The exhibition is divided into 6 themes: Passages, Work, Defiance, Religion, Spaces, and Portraits. The exhibition also consists of installations of African working migrants and artists, antiracist campaigns and protest songs which illustrate the advocacies of Africans and Civic organizations in Europe.
The exhibition opens on Wednesday at 7 pm on April 22nd till June 30th 2009 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Library at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, New York.