Afrowalkers: antiracist sensory cartography

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Image credit: Artak Petrosyan on Unsplash

Blog post by Joy Helena González-Güeto

Starting in November 2022, a pilot test of the Afrowalkers: antiracist sensory cartography project will be carried out in Madrid. It will be hosted by the antiracist organization Conciencia Afro. The Afrowalkers’ project is a participatory and creative research process whose purpose is to make visible the anti-Blackness racism of the peripheral neighbourhoods of Madrid through sensory-affective data. Through this methodology, we construct smells, sounds, gaze and other sensory maps that allow innovative documentation of the contemporary history of racialization. At the same time, those maps pretend to show the different ways the Black population inhabits, walks and transforms the sensory experience of the city.

How was this project born?

I am a Black Colombian woman and an immigrant. I am also a researcher on race and racism who arrived in Madrid in 2020 to carry out a sensory ethnography as part of my Ph.D. dissertation, “How does racialization feel? A journey through the racial markedness of poor and working-class neighborhoods in Cartagena (Colombia) and Madrid (Spain)”. That process was determined by my incorporation as a Black researcher into the city’s daily life. In that research, the ways of “feeling” (sensations and emotions) were revealed as constitutive elements of racialization and the racist dynamics of urban space. Thanks to sensory studiesand the sociology with emotions, the research process produced a wide variety of experiential accounts and sensory-rich descriptions of the urban space: smell, kinesthesia, proxemic, proprioception, sight, touch and hearing. This antiracist analysis of the senses was carried out by articulating emotions such as shame, rage, fear, pleasure, pride, sadness and joy. However, I felt that the research was insufficient to show the sensory data’s centrality to understanding anti-Black racism in Madrid. That is why the Afrowalkers’ project was born.

With this new process, I intend to delve into the research results by constructing antiracist sensory cartography. Sensory cartography is a mediation tool that incorporates sensory information into maps, expanding the universe of understanding of social phenomena and spaces. Afrowalkers’ project uses this methodology to structure, stimulate and innovate the mediation process. At the same time, it allows us to make the project visible in the city and activates memory and embodied listening. This cartographic mediation process aims to:

  • highlight the link between emotions, racialized bodily sensations and places in the city and,
  • consolidate collective proposals for the transformation of the peripheral neighbourhoods of Madrid into a comfortable, pleasant and safe space for the Afro-descendant, African and Black people who inhabit it.

Sensory dimensions of anti-Black racism in Madrid

Many of the forms of discourse that are produced on anti-Black racism in Spain define it as a sporadic and isolated moral failure. However, racism is a socioeconomic structure that defines not only access to material conditions of a decent life but also the degree of comfort and dignity with which non-White people inhabit Madrid. In this city, for example, racial profiling by police forces, raids and racist attacks against Black people on the street have increased. Racism appears every day, on the way to work, on public transport, on social networks, in graffiti, in public assistance offices, in access to health and housing, in refusals to regularize our migratory situation, in the stigmatizing headlines of the press, in the looks of fear and the attempts to exoticize and consume our bodies. Moreover, the recent rise of hate speech and the far right in national politics has only accelerated, deepened and legitimized racist treatment and language in everyday life. Racism in Madrid is an institutional problem that has repercussions on how Black people shape and live in the city.

In Madrid’s peripheral sectors, the words to talk about the experience of racialization have in common the emotional nuance and the bodily experience to which they refer: “clash of cultures”, “Not-good-stuff”, “trouble”, “someone annoying”, “ignorance”. For example, the Spanish word “jaleo” – with which inhabitants defined their own experience of racialization – means quarrel, fight or clutter. It is, therefore, an affective and ordinary vocabulary that puts into words the daily, bodily and spatial experience of racism. At the same time, it assigns meanings to that experience. It establishes what Hochschild calls “rules of feeling”: interpretive patterns of experience that culturally define what should be felt in certain social situations. The different Black, African-descent and African people who inhabit Madrid establish sensory communities: they experience, identify and assign common meanings to the daily racialization process. Racialization and racism are an experience of shared suffering in which emotions such as fear, shame or disgust intervene. In other words, the experience of racialization involves particular ways of feeling and accumulates suffering that predisposes the body.

Madrid is what Avtar Brah would call diaspora spaces: places where daily experience, conflicts and interactions, in general, are associated with tensions between those who consider themselves legitimate inhabitants of the city and those who are perceived as ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’. The peripheral sectors of Madrid are diaspora spaces due to the daily co-presence of multiple sensory schemes, emotional experiences and networks of artifacts in a dispute linked to inter-hierarchical identity narratives. In each peripheral neighbourhood of the city, there are stores called “Chinos” (Chinese), booths attended mainly by Latin American, Pakistani or Bangladeshi people, ways of being in public space perceived as “gypsy” or “panchitas” (derogatory way of calling Latin American people), salsadromos, wiphalas, corners typically inhabited by young Black Dominicans, fields where “African” men gather, etc. This configuration of urban space reflects itself in the hierarchy of sounds (noise, “normal” sounds and civilizing silences), the smells of people, their typical food and their homes (aromas, strong smells, odours and stenches), movements of the bodies (suspects, dangerous or “normal”), the looks, the emotions, etc.

The daily sensory-affective form of racial and identity conflicts in the street is related to aspects at a structural and historical level. Events such as the constitution of transnational multilateral organizations, the increase in the use of digital social networks, neo-constitutionalism, the Covid-19 pandemic, social mobilizations, the political rise of fascism worldwide, internal conflicts or the crisis of the Mediterranean print specificities to the most ordinary ways of feeling racialization. For example, with the entry into force of Organic Law 4/2000 – popularly known as the “immigration law” – the so-called Mediterranean crisis and the rise of the extreme right as a political party in Spain, police arrests for racial profiling and racist attacks on the streets of the neighbourhoods have increased.

Through historical accumulation, a generalized mode of perception has been consolidated. Racial differences are perceived as an unquestionable material reality: a sensory apparatus of race. This perception model generates a cluster of shared emotions and sensations that appear in our ways of talking about racialization. Rage, fear, disgust, desire, shame, laughter, and pain settle in the body due to daily interactions and sociohistorical forces that train perception. This turns bodily sensations into resources for knowledge about how racialization is experienced in everyday life in cities. In this way, racialization is not only a system of oppression but also an assembly of sensory experiences with “texture, movement, rhythm, temperature and weight” that emotionally affect social actors. Racial markings are felt. Gender, class, body prosthetics, work, training, legal and political frameworks, situation, place, and biography: all these aspects also intervene in the multitude of different and sophisticated ways in which racialization feels in the city.

What is antiracist sensory cartography?

A wide variety of researchers from different areas have used sensory maps as a strategy for processing and communicating results. The primary influence of this proposal is the artistic-investigative work of Kate McLean, who makes smell maps of different European cities without necessarily linking them to racism. The collective realization of antiracist sensory maps of Madrid aims to use all this accumulated methodological knowledge to link it with a critical reflection on racism. That is what antiracist sensory cartography is: groups of Black, African-descent, and African people from each of the peripheral districts of Madrid who walk the city together, discuss the sensory forms in which everyday racism is manifested in their neighbourhoods and, from there, graphically reconstruct their daily experience of racialization in urban space.

Afrowalkers’ project is developed in several phases. The first involves the constitution of groups of Afrowalkers. Sensory axes distribute the groups, for example, proprioception, kinesics, and proxemic; smells and emotions; looks; textures and memory; sounds and emotions. In the pilot to be carried out with Conciencia Afro, the groups of Afrowalkers are constituted guaranteeing parity between men and women, as well as the participation of sexual and gender dissidence. In the second phase, training workshops are held for the participants on the methodology, history, and sensory-affective dimensions of the Black diaspora and racialization. The third phase begins a documented collective process in which each group of Afrowalkers designs their paths or itineraries and becomes familiar with the cards for recording sensory information that I have previously designed. These cards include two main categories: a) common sensory perceptions based on the racial stigma of places and people; and b) Afrowalkers sensorial perception of places. Under those two categories, several experiential and discursive elements are added. The fourth phase is the walks themselves: each group of Afrowalkers executes the walk with the traced itinerary, registering the sensory-affective elements in the designed mapping cards. The fifth phase implies that each group of Afrowalkers builds its map in an artisanal way and draws conclusions about the walk carried out, highlighting: manifestations of everyday racism in their district and proposals to correct it. Each map is later transferred to a digital format that allows them to be shared on the web.

What does this allow?

A methodology like this allows an understanding of the experience of Black people in urban spaces. This project would enable the documentation and innovative account of the contemporary history of racialization, as well as the different ways in which the Black, Afro-descendant and African population live, travel and transform the city. Afrowalkers’ projectguarantees the direct political participation of an immigrant and racialized population in building proposals for improving their quality of life: the reduction of everyday racism in the peripheral districts of Madrid. Today more than ever, we are faced with the need for artistic and cultural processes that address this violence with non-traditional formulas.

We intend to “regain health and the street”. After the Covid-19 pandemic, Black, Africans and people of African descent that inhabits Madrid have been one of the hardest hit materially and mentally. We have experienced more stigmatization and state neglect, and that situation has made the street an even more uncomfortable, painful, and dangerous scenario for us. For this reason, the participatory and collective dialogue that the Afrowalkers’ project proposes is in the street: so that they see us and we see each other, to make our existence and right to the city visible.

About the author

Joy Helena González-Güeto, PhD, is a Black independent researcher, teacher and evaluator of Public Policies. She received her PhD in 2021 from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO, México). Since then, she has been a visiting professor at antiracist seminars at various universities in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and EE.UU. She lives in Madrid (Spain), where she collaborates as author and editor at Negrxs MGZ (Black Magazine in English), a periodic web publication dedicated to antiracist activism through art and the production of Afrocentric knowledge.

About the project

As a research-creative process, “Afrowalkers: antiracist sensory cartography” is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA license. See more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode. For those interested in the Afrowalkers project or the methodology, please contact Dr Joy Helena González-Güeto. E-mail: joygonzalezgueto@gmail.com