Afro Festival turns museum garden into a Durbar

There is a building on Senjak that the people of Belgrade have walked past for years without often stepping inside, that low, wavy structure with a round entrance that looks as if someone cut an arch straight out of concrete. For one weekend, that threshold stops being a border. The Museum of African Art, the only institution of its kind in the region, opens its garden and turns it into what the organizers call a Durbar, a festival of festivals.

The Afro Festival runs on June 20 and 21, at Andre Nikolica 14, and places the museum garden at the center of everything. The word Durbar is not accidental. In West African tradition it means a ceremonial gathering, a procession, a meeting of communities, and it is exactly that principle of coming together that the festival brings into a Belgrade setting. The program is designed so that visitors never have to choose between watching and taking part, but move freely from one to the other.

What actually happens in the garden?

The two days are arranged to cover several registers of experience at once. Creative workshops invite the audience to make something by hand, exhibitions return attention to the collection that gave the museum its reason to exist, and food presentations offer what is so often forgotten when an entire continent is discussed, that cuisine is a language too. It matters that there are activities for children, because a festival that thinks about the youngest is a festival that counts on lasting, not just on a single weekend.

Behind the program stands a diplomatic frame, the support of African embassies, which gives the Afro Festival a weight that goes beyond simple cultural display. The Museum of African Art grew out of a private collection and a specific era of Yugoslav foreign policy, a time when ties with African countries were part of a wider idea of the world. Whether it intends to or not, the festival touches that layer of history and keeps it alive, rather than museum-like in the worse sense of the word.

Why is the concert the weekend’s peak?

The musical highlight is saved for Sunday, June 21, when Les Amazones d Afrique perform, a pan-African all-female band founded in 2014 in Bamako, the capital of Mali. The name and the lineup carry a clear message, this is a project that gathers singers from different African settings around a shared stage and a shared voice. Their music joins traditional roots with contemporary production, which is precisely why it suits a space that itself connects past and present.

A concert in the museum garden, under the open sky, at the close of a two-day gathering, is not placed there by chance. It rounds off the idea of the Durbar, a procession that ends in shared celebration. After the workshops, exhibitions and conversations, music is what turns an assembled audience into a single moment, however brief.

The Afro Festival, then, is not only two days of programming but a reminder that the culture of a continent does not reduce to exotica or to a handful of familiar images. The only question is whether we will use the chance to look, through that garden on Senjak, a little further than what we already think we know, or simply pass that wavy building by once again?