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.

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.