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Fuga

La VII edizione del Black History Month Florence amplia i propri orizzonti trasformandosi in Black History Fuori le Mura. La portata dell’iniziativa cresce grazie alla sinergia con il lavoro di analoghi collettivi operativi nelle città di Bologna, Torino e Roma, ma anche puntando anche verso nuove collaborazioni all’estero.

Black History Fuori le Mura è il frutto di un’organizzazione collettiva che riunisce associazioni, individui e istituzioni, generando uno spazio condiviso per la co-promozione degli eventi di Black History Month. Questa piattaforma vuole proporsi quale luogo ideale per il rilancio di una riflessione nazionale e internazionale sul recupero della Black History.

Quest’anno MAD presenterà tre diverse mostre co-prodotte con BHFM, articolate all’interno di tutti i suoi spazi. L’inaugurazione delle mostre si svolgerà giovedì 10 febbraio a partire dalle 17.30, con la presentazione dei progetti da parte di Justin Randolph Thompson, co-fondatore e direttore di Black History Month Florence, l’artista Nidhal Chamekh e la ricercatrice Jessica Sartiani. Nell’occasione verrà presentato il nuovo progetto audiovisivo di DeForrest Brown, Jr. e James Hoff HOBO UFO V. (THE NEW WORLD), che esamina la tumultuosa storia geografica della razza in America.

Questa edizione del BHFM presenta come titolo tematico FUGA: una meditazione sulla fugacità del concetto di Blackness (Moten, Harney 2013) e sulla instabilità che permea realtà geo-culturali sfumando i confini tra locale e transnazionale. È anche una riflessione sulla diffidenza che persiste nel contesto italiano riguardo ai popoli e alle culture d’origine africana, che spinge molti alla fuga.


Hazel | Kevin Jerome Everson

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.

come sa di sale lo pane altrui | Nidhal Chamekh

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.


Justin Randolph Thompson

co-founder and director Black History Month Florence

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of African and African Diasporic cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016. Thompson is a recipient of a Louise Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, two... Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, A Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

 

 

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Kevin Jerome Everson

Artist-filmmaker

Kevin Jerome Everson (born 1965) is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

 

Everson’s films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African... American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work.[1] “Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.”[2]

 

Everson frequently employs hand-held camerawork and uses 16mm to create many of his films. His work has been the subject of retrospective screenings at Media City Film Festival (2011), Tate Modern (2017), online at Mubi (2018), and Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou (2019)

 

Everson has directed nearly a dozen feature-length films and over 100 short films.

 

Exhibitions

Everson’s films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea (February 2017); Viennale (2014); Visions du Reel, Nyon, Switzerland (2012), The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and Media City Film Festival (2011) and Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2009. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Media City Film Festivals, and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.

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Nidhal Chamekh

Artist

Born in 1985 in Dahmani, Tunisia, Nidhal Chamekh graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Tunis and the University of Sorbonne in Paris. He continues to work and live between the two cities. Nidhal’s creations reflect on the times we inhabit. His artwork is situated at the intersections of the biographic and the political, the lived and the historical, the event and the archive. From drawing to installations, and from photography to videos, Nidhal Chamekh’s oeuvres dissect the constitution... of our contemporary identity.

His artwork has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the Aïchi Triennale, the Yinchuan Biennial, the Dakar Biennial and has been shown in Tunis at Politics Collective exhibitions, in Kunsthaus Hamburg, in France at the Museum of contemporary art MAC Lyon, during the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters, in Italy at FM Contemporary Art Center, in London at Drawing Room, in CCA Lagos in Nigeria and Kadist in Paris, in Sao Paulo for Videobrasil Art Biennial and the Skissernas Museum in Sweden.

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Jessica Sartiani

Coffee trainer and coffee expert

Jessica Sartiani is a Florentine coffee trainer and coffee expert. With an Italian father and a mother who is half Filipino and half African-American, it is from her origins that her journey as a woman of coffee starts. As someone trained, operative and attentive to the recent sub-cultures of coffee, she started her work in one of the pioneer coffee shops of this selected product, Ditta Artigianale, ten years ago, studying and discovering all the work that precedes the service in... the coffee shop, giving importance to the producing countries. Her experience evolved with the opening of the first Speciality coffee in Italy, dealing with the training of baristas and customers. She has participated in various competitions such as the Brewers cup, to improve her contact with the public and enrich her background, and has been part of training projects in Honduras, Lithuania and several local coffee start-ups.

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