OPEN MAD

Murate Art District collabora ogni anno con centinaia di artisti nazionali e internazionali a progetti artistici, performativi, fotografici, rendendo partecipe la cittadinanza e la comunità dell’intenso lavoro di ricerca che viene svolto nella nostra città.

MAD apre le porte dal 23 al 27 ottobre 2024: incontri, riflessioni, performance, talk e convegni. Cinque giornate all’insegna della condivisione tra artisti, curatori e pubblico, per prendere parte alla quotidianità di MAD, davanti e dietro le quinte, approfondendo il tema della cura.

After Four Years of development around the research platform Black Archive Alliance as part of a three-year residency at Murate Art District we present the fourth volume. In collaboration with our current research resident, Jessica Sartiani who has been working at MAD since December we present a series of documents and research. The current volume of work includes Research from Roberto Bianchi on the Sciopero della Fame del 1990, a series of documents from the personal archive of Mestre Boca Nua on his work around Capoeira in Florence and fragments from the virtual archive of Jordan Anderson on Black Queerness in Italy. These works are placed in dialogue with the research by Jessica Sartiani that look at the connections between colonial history and coffee production, consumption and marketing.

This exhibition brings together two bodies of work that question and provoke notions of the archive as witness, the archive as bystander. The mixed media works seemingly struggling to hold tight accuracy, to shake the ambiguity that is preserved for the empirical lens of zoological anatomy, the classification of mug shots, the precision of mechanical drawings and the personal intimations that hold them together. Chamekh’s childhood in popular districts of Tunis and the persecution of his militant family deeply impact on his art located at the intersection of the biographic and the political, as he draws memories transformed into testimonies.

The solo project Hazel by Kevin Jerome Everson is born from misremembered or misinterpreted memories in relation to the iconic song and album Maggot Brain. The work draws upon the artist’s memory of what inspired the guitar solo that is the song’s focus, the skewed remembering of a lie designed to inspire passionate and mournful playing. The actuality of the tracks history and what was exchanged between bandleader George Clinton and the guitar player become alternative perceptions, insight and imaginings in this work dedicated to guitarist Eddie Hazel and the sonic realm functions as an element that is familiar yet dissonant, remembered but hauntingly distant.

The seventh edition of Black History Month Florence has arrived bringing with it a new cultural center The Recovery Plan at SRISA functioning as a hub for information, dialogues, research and exchange throughout the month. This edition also represents an expansion of the program shifting into Black History Fuori le Mura.  Extending the reach of the program to collectivize the incredible organizational efforts being carried out in the cities of Bologna, Torino, Roma and Milano, but also pointing towards newly formed collaborations in Paris, Black History Fuori le Mura is the fruit of collective organization that brings together a range of associations, individuals and institutions and is a shared space for the co-promotion of Black History Month events. This platform intends to be generative of a template for a national and international reflection on the recovery of Black History.

This edition is framed through the thematic title FUGA. FUGA is a meditation on the fugitivity of Blackness (Moten, Harney 2013) and its non-fixity permeating geo-cultural realities and blurring the lines between the local and the transnational. It is also a reflection on the push back that continues to persist in the Italian context in relation to discourse around peoples and cultures of African descent prompting many towards flight. FUGA in music is a compositional element where a melodic theme is introduced by one voice only to be taken up successively by others.  This edition wants to provide the call and response necessary to collectively engage in the work that needs to be done in order to move beyond the conceptions that are too often restricted by the flatness and limited frame of Blackness as reflected in mass media, institutional structures and academic discourse in Italy and beyond. Shifting from BHMF to BHFM is about engaging in a form of frequency modulation needed to listen and be heard.

I’ve Known Rivers draws its title from a line in a 1920 poem by Langston Hughes that speaks of diaspora and lineage through the metaphor of rivers. This project looks to the artist Jems Kokobi reworking traditions and connecting his artistic practice to the sustainability of the natural environment through the material of wood and a response to deforestation’s impact on rivers, natural processes that have since been industrialized and a reflection on the reclaiming of the spiritual dimensions of this work. The artist, engaged in Afrocentric meditations on history and the bridging of the contemporary art world to activist tactics, is placed in dialogue with a local representative of the trade unions around tanneries connected to the Arno river and engaged in sustainability through technological processes and the rights of workers. The conversation is an interdisciplinary one placing practice and poetry side by side.

An exhibition that examines the implementation of social obligations towards dirty work, the shortcomings of cultural assimilation, the silencing of histories and the politics of respectability.

The artists in the exhibition each draw upon experiences of a periods of permanence in Italy that pushes them to engage the cities of Rome, Umbertide, Milan and Florence as sites for cultural production with the need to engage history while not falling victim to it.

Activist Pape Diaw, in a 2013 interview spoke of “…sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito “, literally getting our hands dirty to do a clean job. This contradiction is at the core of a social context where dirty work is engaged in to maintain a status governed by the politics of respectability and social policing.

The exhibition, curated by Black History Month Florence, as part of the 5th edition of BHMF, in collaboration with Villa Romana (Florence), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Umbertide) and Galleria Continua (San Gimignano), presents the work of 6 international artists who have used the Italian context as a place of artistic production. A series of transversal works leads to a reworking of stereotyped notions of Made in Italy that tend to exclude Afro-descendents, revealing colonial attitudes and inviting and breaking preconceptions.

An insistence on personal narratives as an override to the flattened projections of Blackness, the construction of bridges between a colonial past and a neo-colonial contemporary reality and the ethereality of monumentality all infuse these works with a meditation on the past as a marker of what’s to come.

Together they form a harmonic melody that is discordant with the prescribed, centralized, consumed narrative but finds just enough alignment to relay its power to enrich the age-old tune

A Villa Romana project in collaboration with Black History Month Florence

Black Archive Alliance brings an unusual perspective to Florence: that of nine students searching for signs of an African presence in the city. The project, which resulted from the collaboration between the Villa Romana and Black History Month Florence and which is now in its second edition, interweaves different areas and time periods. The narratives that emerged from this excavation exercise are fragments of a little-known, if not completely unknown Florence and its political, social and economic entanglements with Africa, Africans and the Diaspora since the 15th century.

The work ranges from research centres par excellence, such as the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the Archivio del Risorgimento, to study centres known mainly to specialists, such as the Istituto Agronomico dell’Oltremare (now one of the headquarters of the Italian Agency for International Cooperation) and the Istituto Geografico Militare, to private collections in Palazzo Pitti with the treasure of the Grand Dukes. The second edition of Black Archive Alliance was carried out as a tutoring format with teachers and scholars in tandem with students, guiding their research. The project collaborated with scholars from Università degli Studi Firenze, Studio Arts College International, NYU Florence, Villa I Tatti, Syracuse University Florence, Santa Reparata International School of Art and ISI Florence.

The exhibition at Murate Art District presents a selection of the research results and links to the exhibition format of Black Archive Alliance’s first edition, which used information stands at various locations and institutions in the city to reveal the unknown or forgotten stories of moments of contact and encounters between Florence and Africa.
Curated by Justin Randolph Thompson, BHMF and Agnes Stillger, Villa Romana

Curated by BHMF With the partnership of MAD Murate Art District

In collaboration with: Boomker Sound Studios Syracuse University Florence SRISA Vivaio Il Giardiniere Antonella Bundu Chris Norcross

And we can no longer breathe And we can no longer see But, in the escape compagno In the fear, compagno Like in the fight, compagno I will be forever by your side

Collettivo Victor Jara, Le Murate

These were the words written and sung by the musical collective Victor Jara days after the 1974 revolt at le Murate jails. Protest against unfit living conditions and oppressive forces are frequent in sites which separate, either willingly or by force, social groups from the world that surrounds them. The socio-spiritual nature of what is just and human worth is at the root of contemplation in isolation. These feelings originated from the artist’s encounter with Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea, they led the project. For the occasion of the fourth edition of Black History Month Florence current Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome Karyn Olivier presents Because Time In This Place Does Not Obey An Order, a series of site specific installations that grapple with the relationship between justice and spirituality. The works engage the history of Le Murate and its transition from a site of spiritual recluse to a carceral space sifting through the continuity and contrast that these histories evoke. Mental health, social critique, isolation, the closeting of history and the conflation of senses set cloistered gardens in dialogue with the steady words of Martin Luther King Jr. writing from a jail cell and reveal traces of life behind closed doors which claims universal rights.

Miles Davis is one of the most iconic figures of Jazz history. His biography is one of complex evolution and artistic persistance. In many ways jazz is often far removed from the appreciation of younger generations and the magic of its expansion of sound and cultural impact are hence too frequently lost. This exhibition takes on the form of the comic book in order to narrate the life and times of Davis and the impulses behind some of his compositions which have gone on to become jazz standards. Lucio Ruvidotti transformed a love for jazz into a comic book that invites the viewer to an intimate look at this artist and celebrates the impact that he has had on the world of music. These works engage an audience that spans generations bringing this figure to the forefront, as Ruvidotti explains himself:

“I tried to tell story of this figure, the prince of darkness, the great artist, taking advantage of some episodes of his exuberant exaggerated life. But above all the goal was to show, through the language of comics, his music, incredibly evolved from the forties to the nineties.”

The comic strip released in 2018 by Edizioni BD tells the story through eight chapters entitled with the names of some of his most important compositions. Each part of the book is also distinguished by a different use of the color and composition of the table. Alongside the original drawings made by the artist, the exhibition shows a series of cartoon prints, accompanied by the music of Miles Davis that pervades the Emeroteca delle Murate room.

Black Archive Alliance
Villa Romana in the context of Cantiere Toscana, in collaboration with BHMF

Objectives
Present archival materials in sites throughout the city broadening the access to the findings Highlight histories that have frequently been omitted from local memory Provide the foundational spark for future research in this field Remedy the state of amnesia that isolates African and African Diasporic presence in the city and country as an exclusively contemporary phenomenon Highlight the research and researchers who have already been doing this work Produce texts and photographic exhibition materials that can later be re-installed as educational resources.

Colonial Postcards and Landscape architecture
MAD Murate Art District (Emeroteca) 5:30 pm Presentation of the project dedicated to Colonial Postcards from Italian editors and Stamps from the Poste Italiane with the research of the Students of Angelica Pesarini’s Black Italia class at New York University Florence together with the presentation of an artistic project dedicated to Colonial Botanical Gardens by Michele Dantini.

Landscape architecture. African city parks and botanical gardens by Michele Dantini
For Black Archive Alliance Michele Dantini presents a research rooted in various international archives that investigates African botanical gardens, their colonial conception and their meaning today. The history of African city parks and botanical gardens is interwoven with State political or social vicissitudes, colonization and de-colonization processes, the establishment of new nations, and, in varying ways, with the history of agriculture and the forest. Above all, it is interwoven with a fantasy that is deeply inscribed in the European colonial imagination, that of an African Eden designed for hunting and timeless emotions, and – with the norms, demarcations and prohibitions that led to the creation of natural parks and protected areas – made inaccessible to local populations.

Preparing a Recovery Plan
MAD Murate Art District6 pm
Preparing a Recovery Plan_Artist Screening of artists working with the archive as form and context with videos by: Lerato Shadi, Kevin Jerome Everson e Alessandra Ferrini (with presence of artists)

Sites/Sources/Projects

Biblioteca Marucelliana, Via Camillo Cavour, 43, 50129 Florence;  8.30 am – 6.30 pm
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Piazza San Lorenzo 9, 50123 Florence; 9.30 am -1.30 pm
British Institute of Florence/ Harold Acton Library, Lungarno Guicciardini 9, 50125 Florence; 10 am – 6 pm
Mediateca Toscana, Via San Gallo 25, 50129 Florence; 10 am – 1 pm / 2 – 7 pm
Centro Studi La Pira, Via dei Pescioni 3, 50123 Florence, 9  am – 7 pm
Fondazione Santa Maria Nuova, Piazza Santa Maria Nuova 1, 50122 Florence; 10 am-1 pm / 3 – 7 pm
SACI/ Worthington Library, Palazzo dei Cartelloni, Via Sant Antonio 11, 50123 Florence; 9 am – 9 pm
Syracuse University Florence/ Syracuse Florence Library, Piazza Fra’ Girolamo Savonarola 15, 50132 Florence; 9 am -1.30 pm / 3 – 8 pm
The other spaces are visitable in their opening hours. We invite the public to pass by the sites to see the shows and collect the pages of the catalogue dedicated to each individual archive free of charge.

Villa Romana, as part of the Cantiere Toscana project, supported by the Region of Tuscany – Toscanaincontemporanea2018 and in collaboration with BHMF, is organizing a series of mini-exhibitions, tours and presentations based on private and public archives, collections and libraries throughout Florence with holdings that reflect the realities and histories of African and African Diasporic people and their representation. This series of shows from the 27th-29th of November creates a virtual map of this archival presence in the city. A resulting catalogue intends to assist future research while providing insight to people who visit the range of spaces dislocated throughout Florence and beyond with which we are in collaboration.

Mountaintops is an artistic workshop designed for elementary school children that celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. while pushing participants to dream beyond what they can see and to aspire for what appears out of reach. Drawing upon the 1968 speech in which King states, ”I’ve been to the Mountaintop” the workshop has three intertwined activities that take on the language of sculptural installation and the performance qualities. The workshop involves the creation of a painted 360° mountain landscape, a series of topographic mountains atop wooden posts and the creation of a climbing surface. Reflecting upon Martin Luther King’s legacy, the three elements examine the meaning of dreams and ambition, the importance of leadership and techniques for overcoming obstacles.

From where I stand: Investigating the ideas of creating our own hurdles the first element of the workshop is dedicated to the realization of the freestanding 360 landscape painting. A freestanding series of posts will support a cardboard range of mountaintops cut out and painted by the participants of the workshop. This range will be attached to the top of the supporting posts placing the participants in the center of a small space surrounded by mountains of their own creation. A range of colors will imagine the cool sunrise on one side and the warm sunset on the other. It takes a village: Examining the form of topographic maps, and the symbolic power of staffs this work involves the casting of a small mountain range in plaster that is mounted atop a wooden post to create a staff. Only when all staffs are placed together do we have a mountain range. This element emphasizes the importance of leadership and the simultaneous importance of collaboration and community. The Climb: The last element of the workshop is about overcoming obstacles. It involves the affixing of a series of custom rock climbing holds to a wooden mountain shaped wall and the exploration of climbing this form. A series of rock climbing holds created by the artist are attached to the surface of the mountain each one placed based on the choices of the participants. Once assembled participants climb this wall learning some of the tricks and techniques of rock climbing.

Ispirato al Black History Month celebrato negli Stati Uniti e nel Regno Unito, l’evento fiorentino mette in risalto i contributi culturali della diaspora africana che hanno influenzato la cultura popolare Italiana.
Conferenze, proiezioni di film, letture di libri, mostre d’arte, eventi enogastronomici, concerti e spettacoli ricordano i più importanti passaggi della storia africana ponendola in relazione con il panorama contemporaneo fiorentino.

All’interno di questa iniziativa si inserisce la XV edizione della rassegna Videozoom curata da Antonella Pisilli che quest’anno presenta opere di 8 video artiste africane dal titolo “Africana womanism” e l’installazione “Film noir per Lampedusa” di Clay Apenouvon.

Videozoom: Africana Womanism è un progetto video “work in progress”: in mostra opere di video-arte contemporanea, presentate tenendo conto delle specificità culturali delle diverse realtà del mondo. Il progetto vuole proporre una visione nuova della donna africana attraverso l’occhio dell’artista; Africana Womanism, nello specifico, porta alla ribalta il ruolo di madri africane come leader nella lotta per ritrovare, ricostruire e creare un’integrità culturale che abbraccia gli antichi principi di reciprocità, equilibrio, armonia, giustizia, verità e ordine.
Fanno parte delle artiste di Africana Womanism: Nirdeva Alleck (Mauritius), Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon), Rehema Chachage (Tanzania), Wanja Kimani (Kenia), Michèle Magema (RDC), Fatima Mazmouz (Marocco), Myriam Mihindou (Gabon), Tabita Rezaire (Francia-Guyana/Danese)

Film noir per Lampedusa, di Clay Apenouvon (Togo), interpreta una Lampedusa contemporanea, luogo di migrazioni; attraverso un’installazione site-specific, realizzata dall’artista per Murate Art District, si esplora la capacità dei materiali di essere supporto fisico e medium artistico per trasmettere il messaggio socio-politico dell’artista.
Non nuovo a questo tipo ti incursioni artistiche, Clay Apenouvon lavora con materiali plastici di colore nero, che evocano la liquida vischiosità del petrolio.

I due progetti sono stati inaugurati venerdì 3 febbraio 2017 alle ore 17.30 presso MAD Murate Art District.