VIII edition of Black History Month Florence SFORZANDO

Muna Mussie in collaboration with SADI
የቦሎኛ ጎዳና | بولونیا / Bologna St. 173 (Re-Turn)

Georges Senga
Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique

Jermay Michael Gabriel
David and other feats

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6 p.m.

Opening

7 p.m., pavilion
Performance
የቦሎኛ ጎዳና | بولونیا / Bologna St. 173 (Re-Turn)
Muna Mussie in collaboration with SADI
Curated by BHMF, Ooh Sound and Nub Project Space
(Part of IL CLAMORE è DIVENUTO VOCE, four days of music and performance)

Exhibition
Georges Senga
Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique
Jermay Michael Gabriel
David and other feats
Curated by BHMF and Lucrezia Cippitelli

Villa Romana has been a central axis of the work of Black History Month Florence for the past seven years and the collaboration that this exhibition represents underlines this positioning of the institution in relation to The Recovery Plan and launches the new season, welcoming the director Elena Agudio.

For the VIII edition of Black History Month Florence, Villa Romana presents two exhibitions dedicated to the artists Jermay Michael Gabriel and Georges Senga. Co-curated by BHMF and Lucrezia Cippitelli, the exhibitions look to the archive as an unsettled site of creation, questioning and mobility. Collective and personal memory along with ethereal and physical indicators of conditions and conditioning, point to the role of speculation and fablulation in the artistic production of both artists.

With Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique artist Georges Senga presents the latest chapter of this ongoing series of work and accompanying book curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli, drawing from the family archive of Bonaventure Salumu. The reimagining of the archival traces, reconfguring them and re-narrating them as a gesture for overcoming the slippages and absences but also for mediating the distance between personal and collective forms of memory. With David and other feats artist Jermay Michael Gabriel presents a new body of work in dialogue with a pre-existing video installation David. Reclaiming objects that have traversed the black market and ended up in antique fairs the work is a gesture towards restitution and towards the reconsideration of the colonial violence embedded in some collecting practices.

Muna Mussie in collaboration with SADI
የቦሎኛ ጎዳና | شارع بولونیا | Bologna St. 173
A circular and nonlinear homecoming. The exhibition traces, though the artist's memories, a path between Bologna-City, Asmara-Streets. The artist identifies with her work. Atomized and off-centered, the parts of this installation move with her to redefine the concept of home that opened her research at ArchiveSite: Bologna Street 173 is everywhere, an "adaptable" house modifies its shape depending on the bodies that inhabit it. Re-Turn Bologna Street is also a small tribute to the artist Tsehaytu Beraki (The Sun of Eritrea), a political activist who has sung about Eritrea's 30-year-long lasting struggle for Independence through her poetry and music. In one of her songs, Beraki sang, "Our people are the sea and our revolution is the fish," as Mussie now calls her works, her home.


Muna Mussie is an Eritrean artist living in Bologna. Her work investigates the performing arts and the scenic languages to give shape
to the tension that flows between different expressive poles, through gesture, vision and word. Some of her recent productions, including the installations and performances, Milite Ignoto (2015), Oasi (2018), Curva (2019), Curva Cieca (2021) and PF DJ (2021), investigate spectral apparitions and minor history. https://www.munamussie.com/

SADI/Sam Barreto Cardoso Bertoldi, is a musician and sound-artist which is active since 2007. Born as a percussionist and multi-instrumentalist, he produces experimental/ambient and glitch music for contemporary art installations and dance performances. His inspiration is nature: his art projects invite immersion in a world of surreal dreams through experimentation with technological error, ambient sound textures and interpolation of broken rhythms. https://www.sadimusique.com/homepage/

Jermay Michael Gabriel is an Italian-Ethio-Eritrean transdisciplinary artist born in Addis Abeba. He lives and works in Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, at the Department of Applied Arts. Michael Gabriel's work is based on pushing the limits of experimentation, often through violent forms of resistance. The artist challenges the permanence and elusiveness of the Italian colonial archive through the subversion of symbols of power as a gesture towards resistance.

Born in 1983 in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo), Georges Senga is a photographer. He develops his photographic work around history and the stories revealed in “memory, identity and heritage”, shedding light on our actions and the present. Three of his projects thus explore memory, in search of the resonances that men, their facts and objects leave behind, and the resilience of memory in his country, Congo. Georges Senga’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions : Lubumbashi Biennale in 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2019, Asbl Dialogues in 2013, Bamako Biennale in 2011, 2015 and 2017, Addis Fotofest in 2014 and 2018, Kampala Biennale in 2014, Cape Town Art Fair in 2018, Sesci_video Brazil in 2019, Contour Biennale in 2019, Kigali PhotoFest in 2019, Fondation A in 2019, Wiels art centre in 2019, Galerie Imane Farès in 2019, Cargo in Context in 2019, FOMU in 2019, Jean Cocteau cultural centre in 2020, United Nations, United States in 2020.

Opening hours

Monday 2 p.m. - 7 p.m

Tuesday - Friday 9 a.m. - 7 p.m.

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