January 16 - February 2, 2024
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. 11am - 5pm
Wednesday, 11am - 2pm

curated by BHMF (Black History Month Florence)

Black Archive Alliance was the first research platform advanced by The Recovery Plan*. It was designed to facilitate the development and proliferation of research dedicated to Black history within and beyond Italian archives that speak to diasporic studies and Globally inscribed Blackness.

Collapsing personal and public archives and advancing a critical engagement with documents and images, this platform, since its inception in 2018, has worked with over 30 sites and more than 20 researchers. The selection of research presented for this occasion looks to the forms of social resistance employed to maintain a sense of cultural origins in the face of calls for assimilation masked through the language of integration. The display is enriched by a meditation on experimental methodologies for sharing the Black past with an insistence on narrative possibilities beyond institutional walls and a gesture towards the annotations that are needed in order to take a position in relation to the recovery from the violence of distortions advanced by white constructions of Black cultural values.

*The Recovery Plan is a research center that fosters transnational exchange around Afrodescendent cultures and peoples employing research, production and documentation in relation to cultural practitioners as a means for examining the history and contemporary legacy of Blackness in a global context. Designed as a cultural repository, research center and exhibition space for art, performance, lectures and socially engaged education, the center hosts a range of events, seminars, workshops and residencies that address Italy as a historic site for cultural exchange. Presented as a range of platforms, the initiative is a rallying of voices designed to facilitate cross-cultural research and dialogue.