Johny Pitts to launch AFRØPEAN Podcast and Photo Book

AFRØPEAN: THE PODCAST 6-part limited run series launches 5th November

Europe is at a crossroads. For centuries, the continent has been built by the intercultural exchange of people and ideas, often under exploitative conditions. In recent years, public debate has become dominated by culture wars which has stifled discussion. Now, with far-right politics on the rise, it is time to reflect on the cultural impact and resilience of an African diaspora that has redefined the major metropolitan centres of Europe.

Afropean Podcast sheds light on a Europe often missing from tourist guides and official national narratives. Each episode dives deep into a different European capital: Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Lisbon and Paris. With on-the-ground recordings it is an immersive listening experience, featuring Decolonial canal rides in Amsterdam, Black history walking tours of Brussels and Paris, architectural wanderings from the hinterlands of Stockholm, musical journeys to the Buracas of Lisbon, and psycho-geographic strolls along the former fault lines of the Berlin Wall.

The series also features interviews with some of Europe’s leading black scholars, artists, activists and musicians, such as Gloria Wekker, Sibo Kanobana, Zap Mama, Les Nubians, Joy Denalane, the Black Archives in Amsterdam, Stephen Simmonds, Olivette Otele, Bonaventure Ndikung, Kalaf Epalanga, and many more.

Afropean Podcast will be released by Reduced Listening and available on all major podcast platforms. It launches on 5 November, with weekly episodes thereafter. Produced and sound designed by Femi Oriogun-Williams. This project was made possible with the support of National Geographic.

Photobook: Afropean Journal

To coincide with the release of the podcast, a definitive new high quality 300-page analogue photobook; Afropean Journal, published by Mörel, will be launched at Paris Photo 2024, bringing together twenty years of Pitts’ photographs, notebooks and ephemera for the first time, adding a complex and atmospheric rendering of the Black experience in Europe.

About Johny Pitts

Johny Pitts is a writer, broadcaster and artist who works with photography.
His book Afropean: Notes From Black Europe has been translated into eight languages and won the Jhalak Prize, the European Essay Prize, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding and The Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing. It has been optioned by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Potboiler productions for a documentary adaptation. Home is not a Place, a collaboration with TS Eliot Prize Winning poet Roger Robinson, which toured Britain’s coast to tell the story of Black Britain through photographs and poems, was shortlisted for a British Book Award and won the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship. Visibility, an essay for Tate Britain in response to their collection, was highly commended for accessible art writing at the 2024 Historians of British Art Book Prize.

As a photographer he has had solo exhibitions at FOAM Amsterdam and The Photographer’s Gallery London, amongst others, and curated the touring exhibition, After The End of History: British Working Class Photographers 1989-2024 for The Hayward Gallery. Johny’s broadcasting credentials include presenting on MTV, ITV and the BBC where he is currently the host of Open Book for BBC Radio 4.

He is a European Young Leader, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a National Geographic Explorer and runs the ENAR (European Network Against Racism) award winning afropean.com with Nina Camara, Yomi Bazuaye, Tola Ositelu and Nat Illumine. He is a member of the UCL European Institute Advisory Board. 

Read about our [Black Europe] work stream

Photos: Johny Pitts, Paris metro; Self Portrait, Red Square; Baker Street, London.