Diuen que soc. Anatomia d'una fabulació. A project by Miguel Ángel Rosales with the participation of Yinka Esi Graves and David García López de la Osa. Part of the exhibition cycle “Potential Legacies”, curated by Oriol Fontdevila.

The wounds opened by the removal of the popularly known Negre de Banyoles from public display and his subsequent repatriation remain sensitive issues to address to this day, whether among the family of Dr Alphonse Arcelín — who in 1991 described the public exhibition of the dissected body as a “racist affront” —, African and Afro-descendant communities established in Catalonia, anti-racist activist movements and those involved in decolonial struggles, as well as within the social and institutional fabric of Banyoles.

Miguel Ángel Rosales (Jerez de la Frontera, 1964) approaches the history of the Negre de Banyoles as a symptomatology, as a set of fantastical manifestations produced by the colonial imaginary of the white man. From its creation as a taxidermy specimen to the body’s hasty repatriation to a country that was most likely the wrong one, the Negre de Banyoles is a great fabrication that has unfolded over almost two hundred years.

“Diuen que soc. Anatomia d’una fabulació” proposes a form of curatorship that operates through dreaming. Archival documents and testimonies from the struggle for repatriation enter into tension, in this exhibition, with a dreamlike narrative in which dancer Yinka Esi Graves (London, 1983) brings to life a reproduction of the Negre de Banyoles giant head made to order by an amateur theatre company in 1989. The giant head dreams of the different skins that history has posthumously attached to that unfortunate human being who, around 1830, fell into the hands of taxidermist Jules Verraux in the vicinity of Cape Town.

“Potential legacies” is an exhibition cycle organised by Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani de Girona, which, throughout 2026 and 2027, presents a series of newly commissioned artistic projects based on case studies concerning heritage controversies that originate in, or extend into, the counties of Girona.

Activity linked to the celebration of the city’s 2,100th anniversary, “Girona, 2,100 years.”