In 2010, the world was recovering from a seismic financial crash. The Great Recession was the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression (1929 – 1939), and in the USA, households lost an average of 26% of their net worth. The effects rippled across the world, and in the UK, unemployment reached its highest rate in a decade, whilst earnings failed to keep up with prices. It was in this climate of uncertainty, desperation and hardship that photographer and writer Johny Pitts embarked on a five-month journey across Europe, armed with several notebooks and a camera. The project grew from a necessity both intimate and political: to understand what it means to be Black in Europe, beyond cliches, identity assignations and dominant narratives. The discovery of the word Afropean came as a revelation, and formed the basis of his latest exhibition at MEP in Paris, Black Bricolage.
Raised in a multi-ethnic home in the working-class outskirts of Sheffield – a city devastated by the pressures of liberal economics for decades – Pitts became aware of a world that had remained invisible to him, which refused to reject any of the cultures he identified with, but brought them together as a unified whole. It is from this founding tension that the Afropean project was born, and with it, the possibility of thinking of oneself within an open space where Black cultures participate fully in the shaping of European identities and experiences. The artist says: “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. That being Black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.”
Black Bricolage brings together photographs, notebooks and documents that bear witness to Black experiences in Europe and beyond, between 2004 and 2024. From Paris to Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm Moscow, Lisbon, Rome, Marseille and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to newer works that include images made in Freetown, Salvador Bahia and the US deep South, Pitts illuminates Afro-European and Afro-diaspora realities that are often rendered invisible or overlooked. His approach refuses both nostalgia and stereotype, favouring the ordinary: informal conversations, cafes, communities centres, daily commutes, living spaces. A school boy walks home, a basketball tucked under his arm. A man stands on Rye Lane in London, wearing a Union Jack cap. Snow gently falls in front of the African Development Trust in Finsbury Park. Pitts’ work is built through proximity, listening and exchange, in the company of workers, activists, musicians, educators, students and researchers. This is a truly collaborative project.
The exhibition at MEP uses the gallery’s studio space as an immersive scrapbook, where images, texts, archives and testimonies interweave through plays of reflection, blur and assemblage. Writing and photography function here as a single, unified gesture: each image opens a narrative, each note extends a gaze. The notebooks do not explain the images – they reveal the conditions of their emergence. In doing so, Pitts invites active experience: to take the time to look, read, listen and move through the space. It offers an atmosphere to inhabit, where his broad approach to culture unfolds and music, language, memory and everyday life converge. MEP provides a unique way to experience photography, going beyond images in isolation to reveal how engaging with various communities shaped Pitt as both an artist and personally.
Pitts’ latest exhibition does not impose a single narrative, opening a shared space, where stories, cultures and futures of Black Europeans are made visible in all their complexity. There’s a distinct sense of this show being part of something wider – a wider culture, wider conversation, wider experience. It is a platform for shared stories and lived realities, welcoming visitors to see the vibrancy of Afropean culture.
Johny Pitts — Black Bricolage is at MEP, Paris until 24 May: mep-fr.org
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Johny Pitts, Tunmise, 2021 © Johny Pitts.
2. Johny Pitts, A Portable Paradise, Clichy-sous-Bois, 2010 © Johny Pitts.
3. Johny Pitts, African Development, Finsbury Park, 2010 © Johny Pitts.
4. Johny Pitts, Baker Street, Londres, 2010 © Johny Pitts.
5. Johny Pitts, Rye Lane, 2021 © Johny Pitts.
