Cultural relations between Europe and Africa are shaped not only through artworks, festivals, cooperation programmes or artistic mobility.
They are also shaped through narratives.
Articles, exhibitions, catalogues, institutional programmes, documentaries, digital publications, curatorial texts and project descriptions all contribute to explaining cultural developments, selecting what deserves attention and giving meaning to practices circulating between different contexts.
Producing a cultural narrative is therefore never a secondary activity.
Naming a scene, contextualising a work, presenting an artist or defining the significance of a project already involves proposing a particular reading of reality.
The question is therefore not simply: who tells the story?
A more precise question is: who has the capacity to frame a narrative, translate it, give it a recognised form and enable it to circulate beyond its original context?
A narrative begins with framing
Every narrative involves selection.
An article cannot tell everything.
An exhibition cannot show every dimension of an artistic scene.
A cooperation programme has to select themes, partners, territories and categories.
These decisions produce a frame.
They determine what moves into the foreground and what remains outside the narrative.
Describing an artistic practice as “contemporary”, “emerging”, “traditional”, “diasporic”, “engaged” or “intercultural” does more than simply describe it.
Such categories influence how it will be understood.
Cultural narratives therefore begin before they are circulated.
They begin when someone chooses the terms through which a reality will become legible.
Who has the capacity to name?
In principle, all actors can produce their own narratives.
But they do not all have the same capacity to establish their categories within wider spaces of circulation.
A recognised institution, international media outlet, publishing house, museum, curatorial platform or professional network can give considerable reach to particular formulations.
Their influence does not necessarily come from possessing a more accurate interpretation.
It also comes from their capacity to distribute it.
A category used by a major institution may be repeated by journalists, researchers, programmers and other organisations.
Over time, it may become a common way of describing a scene, territory or artistic generation.
Naming therefore becomes a form of mediation.
And once categories circulate for long enough, they can begin to appear natural.
Europe and Africa: avoiding continental narratives
This issue becomes particularly sensitive when discussing cultural relations between Europe and Africa.
The two terms can easily create the impression of coherent cultural spaces.
Yet neither “Europe” nor “Africa” constitutes a homogeneous cultural scene.
Institutional trajectories, languages, colonial histories, public policies, cultural markets and professional networks vary significantly from one territory to another.
Speaking of “African culture” as a single entity already constitutes a form of framing.
The same applies when “Europe” is treated as if it occupied one uniform cultural or institutional position.
A more rigorous analysis can use geographic categories when necessary without turning them into totalising cultural identities.
The challenge is to move from the continent as explanation towards context as the object of analysis.
To translate is also to narrate
Cultural narratives frequently circulate across several languages.
This circulation introduces another form of mediation: translation.
Translation is not simply a matter of replacing words with their equivalents.
It often requires explaining a context, reformulating a reference, choosing between several possible terms or making an institution understandable when no direct equivalent exists in the target language.
These choices shape the narrative.
A concept may become clearer while losing part of its specificity.
A local category may be replaced with a term that is more easily recognised internationally.
A project may be described using the vocabulary expected by a funding programme or partner institution.
Translation therefore becomes a form of contextualisation.
The question is not only whether a narrative circulates in several languages, but also what changes when it moves from one language to another.
Cultural intermediaries are not simple relays
Journalists, curators, programmers, translators, researchers, editors, institutions and platforms occupy a particular position in these processes.
They do not simply transmit narratives that already exist.
They organise them.
A curator constructs relationships between works.
A journalist selects facts and voices.
An editor chooses an angle.
A programmer places an artist within a category or theme.
An institution writes texts that explain its project to different publics.
These acts produce meaning.
Cultural mediation should therefore be understood as an interpretive activity.
It can open up a context, make a practice accessible and create connections.
It can also simplify, fix or reproduce already dominant categories.
The intermediary is therefore neither necessarily an obstacle nor a neutral observer.
They participate in the construction of the narrative.
Who can speak for whom?
This situation raises a more difficult question: from what position is a narrative produced?
Can someone tell the story of a cultural scene to which they do not belong?
Of course.
Journalism, research, criticism and mediation all depend on the possibility of observing, investigating, contextualising and interpreting realities that are not necessarily one’s own.
The issue is therefore not simply the identity of the person speaking.
It is the conditions under which the narrative is produced.
Which sources have been consulted?
Which voices are included?
Is the context sufficiently understood?
Do the people concerned appear only as subjects of the narrative, or also as producers of knowledge and interpretation?
Do the categories used emerge from the context itself, or are they entirely imported from elsewhere?
The question “who can tell the story?” is therefore less productive than asking “how is the story constructed, and from what position?”
Recognition turns some narratives into references
Not all published narratives acquire the same authority.
Some become references.
They are cited, repeated, taught, programmed or used to introduce a cultural scene to new audiences.
This capacity depends partly on the quality of editorial work.
But it also depends on the infrastructures of recognition through which a narrative circulates.
A publication from a well-known institution may have more direct access to professional networks.
An article published by an established media outlet may be more easily recirculated.
An exhibition organised by a recognised museum can help stabilise certain interpretations over time.
Legitimation is therefore not merely an abstract form of validation.
It has concrete effects on the duration and reach of a cultural narrative.
Institutional narratives have their own constraints
Cultural institutions also produce narratives.
They need to explain their programmes, justify decisions, present partners and make their work understandable to different publics.
But these narratives are also shaped by constraints.
A funded project may need to fit categories established by a programme.
A cooperation project may be described through terms such as dialogue, exchange, diversity, co-creation or partnership.
These terms are not necessarily artificial.
They may describe genuine intentions and practices.
But their repetition can also generate a standardised institutional language that obscures differences between specific situations.
Critical analysis therefore requires comparing the narrative of a project with its actual conditions.
Who defines?
Who participates?
Who funds?
Who is represented?
And which realities become less visible when a project is translated into expected institutional vocabulary?
Diasporic actors complicate the geography of narratives
Diasporic trajectories also make it more difficult to separate “European” from “African” producers of cultural narratives.
A journalist based in Germany may work on cultural scenes in Central Africa.
A curator may develop networks across several countries at once.
An artist may be produced in one territory, live in another and exhibit regularly in a third.
These positions are not external to Europe–Africa relations.
They are part of them.
Diasporic actors may develop particular forms of mediation because they are familiar with several linguistic, professional or institutional contexts.
But this position does not automatically guarantee a more accurate interpretation.
It remains situated.
The analytical significance of diasporic actors therefore lies less in the idea that they are natural “bridges” between two worlds than in the fact that they demonstrate how deeply those worlds are already interconnected through multiple forms of circulation.
Digital environments multiply voices, but not necessarily their reach
Digital environments have greatly expanded opportunities for publication.
Artists, collectives, journalists, researchers and independent organisations can produce and circulate their own narratives directly.
This reduces certain dependencies on traditional media and established institutions.
It also enables new archives, specialist media, podcasts, newsletters, editorial platforms and transnational publishing practices.
But the ability to publish does not guarantee equivalent circulation.
A narrative may exist online and still be difficult to find.
Languages, distribution networks, recommendation systems and available resources for documentation and promotion continue to influence its reach.
The pluralisation of narrative producers therefore does not automatically create equality of visibility.
From a single authority to a plurality of positions
The goal should not be to identify an ideal authority capable of producing the “correct” narrative about cultural relations between Europe and Africa.
No position exists entirely outside its own context.
A more productive approach is to make several positions visible.
An institutional narrative can be compared with that of an artist.
The perspective of an international media outlet can be complemented by a local publication.
The language of a programme can be read alongside the experience of the people participating in it.
An article can acknowledge its limits and make its own field of observation explicit.
This plurality does not eliminate relations of power.
It does, however, make the process through which narratives are constructed more visible.
The challenge is therefore not simply to multiply voices, but to understand the relationships between them.
Documenting contexts rather than producing fixed representations
This perspective also transforms editorial work.
Producing cultural narratives should not mean creating a definitive image of a territory, scene or community.
It should instead involve documenting situations.
Who are the actors?
In what environment do they work?
Which networks do they use?
What constraints do they face?
How do they define themselves?
Which categories help us understand their work, and which risk reducing it?
This approach shifts the emphasis from representation to contextualisation.
The narrative no longer claims to summarise an entire cultural space.
It seeks to make a specific configuration understandable.
Producing a narrative also produces a position
Every cultural narrative ultimately reveals something about the position of the person or institution producing it.
The choice of subjects, terms, sources and images constructs a perspective.
Acknowledging this does not mean abandoning rigour.
On the contrary.
Rigour involves distinguishing what has been observed, what comes from sources and what belongs to interpretation.
It also means avoiding the transformation of practical categories into general truths.
In cultural relations between Europe and Africa, this requirement is particularly important because contemporary narratives are embedded in longer histories of representation, mediation and institutional relations.
Producing a narrative therefore carries editorial responsibility: making realities visible without claiming to speak for an entire context.
Conclusion
Cultural narratives between Europe and Africa are not produced by a single actor or from a single centre.
They emerge through many different practices: artistic production, journalism, programming, translation, research, institutional mediation, independent publishing and digital circulation.
But these practices do not all have the same capacity to make their narratives durable, visible and recognised.
The issue is therefore not only who tells the story.
It is also who can name, contextualise, translate, publish, circulate and turn an interpretation into a reference.
This perspective shifts the question of representation.
Rather than searching for one authoritative narrative about Europe–Africa cultural relations, it becomes possible to examine the conditions under which multiple narratives are produced, encounter one another, compete or complement each other.
It is through this situated plurality — and through the analysis of the infrastructures that shape it — that a more precise understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics can emerge.
