Black Heritage Tours

Location: tour starts and ends at Rozenstraat 59

Developed in dialogue with Enter/Public/Space, this site-specific walking experience explores Amsterdam as a living archive, tracing histories of early Black presence, colonialism, representation, movement, visibility, and belonging in the city’s public space. The walk asks participants not simply to look at the city, but to consider how we have learned to see it. In dialogue with the exhibition’s questions around bodies, mobility, surveillance, and access to public space, the tour considers: Who has historically been able to move freely through Amsterdam? Which bodies were made visible, categorized, controlled, or commodified? Whose presence entered the archive, and whose disappeared from the dominant story of the city?

The route will include sites connected to early Black presence and 17th-century colonial Amsterdam, alongside later public representations of Black bodies. The walk will ultimately bring these histories into conversation with Amsterdam’s contemporary public space and ask what it means for these bodies and stories to become visible again today.