A still from Fred Kudjo Kuwornu’s documentary, “We Were Here: The Untold Story of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” which screens Thursday at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Credit: Courtesy of Fred Kudjo Kuwornu
Acclaimed Italian filmmaker and activist Fred Kudjo Kuwornu will bring his thought-provoking film, “We Were Here: The Untold Story of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” to the Wexner Center for the Arts Thursday, followed by a panel discussion.
Kuwornu said his film challenges the stereotypical notion of an all-white Europe through interviews with historians, philosophers and artists.
“Technically, with this documentary, I didn’t do anything new,” Kuwornu said. “I simply collected all this previous work to basically collect and aggregate all this work into a documentary.”
Kuwornu said the documentary interviews many people, with the goal of showing the audience the rich history Africans have in Europe.
“It’s a documentary based on interviews with art historians, historians, curators, scholars and activists about how [Africans] were represented in a lot of portraits from the Renaissance,” Kuwornu said.
The documentary doesn’t try to retell Europe’s history of slavery, Kuwornu said. Instead, it uses art to invite people to engage with a more historical narrative.
“We are not reconstructing the story of slavery in Europe,” Kuwornu said. “By the way, many of the Africans who were in Europe were coming as ambassadors, diplomats, merchants or they were born as free people. Art became an excuse — a visual excuse — to prove and show the presence of Africans and to attract the audience into a story that is more historical than artistic.”
Kuwornu was born in Bologna, Italy, to an Italian mother and a Ghanaian father. He said having physically lived the life of a Black European helped him during the creation of this documentary.
“I am a part of the film, it’s really relevant and important,” Kuwornu said. “This is a documentary that represents what I would have liked to have seen as a kid when I was in high school.”
Kuwornu said he worked in television prior to being a filmmaker. In 2010, he made his directorial debut with the documentary “Inside Buffalo,” which focuses on the contributions of African-American soldiers to Europe’s liberation during World War II, according to his website.
Pedro Pereira, an associate professor of Portuguese and Iberian Studies and organizer of the event, said his reason for holding the event was to help expand the audience’s views of Black history outside of the United States.
“I would think that most U.S. audiences are unfamiliar with the history of Black presence in Europe,” Pereira said.
Pereira said there has been a growing effort in recent years to bring African history in Europe to light.
“Recently, there has been several reconfigurations in several disciplines in history, art history, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French literature, where scholars are finally paying attention to this issue,” Pereira said.
Pereira said though slaves did exist in Europe, they also played roles across the entire social spectrum.
“There were slaves who would perform mostly urban labor, house cleaning, cooking, street sweeping,” Pereira said. “But we also had people who were a part of African royal families who went to Lisbon to study. There were Black people performing all sorts of roles, from playing music to carrying waste water to be dumped into the river.”
He said the documentary highlights lesser-known African figures in history and the ongoing research that continues to uncover more evidence of their presence in Europe.
“It talks about princes, it talks about writers, it talks about musicians, all of that we know to have existed,” Pereira said. “As research into these matters is carried out, we are learning more and more about the existence of these people.”
Kuwornu said he hopes this documentary starts conversations about the diversity found in history.
“In Europe, the most important conversation I want to have is that people start to recognize the diversity in Europe, especially southern Europe,” Kuwornu said. “We want to bring in that conversation of diversity, and not just African diversity, but the presence of other ethnicities or religions, we really want to bring that with this documentary.”
Tickets for the event are free and can be found on the Wex’s website. A ticket is required for entry.
