The Recovery Plan: Museo MA*GA: Vol. I

The Recovery Plan_ Museo MA*GA
The Recovery Plan @ MA*GA
Young Gifted and Black Italians:
Binta Diaw, Victor Fotso Nyie, Francis Offman, Raziel Perin, Emmanuel Yoro
Gallagher
A research project of Black History Month Florence
by BHMF in collaboration with Simone Frangi
Opening Vol. I:
Raziel Perin: Tale of Tamarindo
3 October 2020, h.18
(on reservation and subject to availability)
Starting from October MA*GA hosts an activation of The Recovery Plan, an itinerant
cultural center, founded by BHMF - Black History Month Florence and dedicated to
the promotion of Afro-descendent cultural productions in the Italian context.
During the four months of activity at Gallarate, The Recovery Plan @ MA*GA
presents, one after the other, five exhibition and research projects, carried out by the
artists Binta Diaw, Victor Fotso Nyie, Francis Offman, Raziel Perin, Emmanuel Yoro
Gallagher as the result of the first edition of YGBI - Young Gifted and Black Italians,
residency and training program dedicated to young Italian Afro-descendant artists
born from a collaboration between BHMF, OCAD - Ontario College of Art and Design
and The Student Hotel.

The Recovery Plan_ Museo MA*GA
Conceived as a collective and dialogic project, YGBI in February 2020 five Afro-
Italian artists to spend ten days together gathered in Florence working in the OCAD
studios. The studio experience was supervised and guided by international curator
Andrea Fatona, professor at OCAD, together with leaf jerlefia, curator and artist.
Each exhibition presented at MA*GA is accompanied by an Afro-descendant
researcher - Simao Amista, Jordan Anderson, Angelica Pesarini, Jessica Sartiani,
Patrick Joel Tatcheda Yonkeu - who will have the task of developing the conceptual
content of the exhibition with the artist. These collaborations will be assisted by
artist-researcher Alessandra Ferrini.
Thanks to the support of SACI- Studio Arts College International and the participation
of Penn State University and Oberlin College, the project is developed in parallel with
a series of lectures and online seminars addressed to university students.

The Recovery Plan_ Museo MA*GA
3 October 2020 to 18 October 2020
The Recovery Plan @ MA*GA - Vol. II
Raziel Perin, A Tale of Tamarindo
Associate researcher: Simao Amista
Through his artistic practice - syncretism of drawings, symbolic voodoo, organic
sculptures with digital grafts and mixed media installation techniques - Raziel Perin
extends and re-appropriates rituals linked to the popular beliefs and the mysticism of his
birthplace, Santo Domingo, and the echoes and influences that have been filtered down
to him in Italy through the weft of his family's diaspora. The research for A Tale of
Tamarindo originates in the study of the history of Santo Domingo and an awareness of
some of the contradictions rooted in this society (as well as in Italy) such as the rejection
of Black inheritance and the demonization of practices related to popular cults born in
plantations.
*The project is realized with the support of Ricola

The Recovery Plan_ Museo MA*GA
Text by Simao Amista
Mami, 2020.cassava, amethyst, sandblasted wrought iron.
In the Yoruba culture, and in many other American and non-American Afrodiasporic
cultures, the female deities that protect and support men and women are called Yabas,
from Iya: mother. In the matrilineal belly of many Africas an ancient knowledge has
nested for millennia. The Iyami are the feared and venerated ancestral mothers. Iyalorisa
are the women in command of the Ile Axé, the sacred temples of African religions in
Brazil. Iya, mother, is like anyone who turns to an older woman, who may not have given
birth to you, but who, respecting and carrying on traditions, takes care of the community
as she would with a child, and every day gives birth to the future. Feminine deities
embody every aspect of femininity: impetus, wisdom, procreation, sensuality,
abundance, courage and lightness. The women and men who worship, honor and
respect every aspect related to them. Mami Wata, the Vodun who holds the snake on
her shoulders is among the most revered in West Africa, and like Yemoja (from Yoruba,
the mother whose sons are fish), has followed her people on the infamous route of
slavery; thanks to them, human sons and daughters have remained clinging to life and
have found a way to rebuild another one beyond the Calunga Grande. Because like Iya
they protected them. Because in the wombs of women, like a precious stone, is kept the
secret of life.
Verja, columna, 2020. treated wrought iron.
As fire forges iron, some symbols can forge bonds with deities, they can create bridges
between material and immaterial. They can give an identity to the divine. In many
traditional African and Afrodiasporic cultures, symbols are used to identify Vodun or
Òrìṣà, Loa or spiritual entities of various kinds, as in Umbanda or Kimbanda in Brazil.
The Haitian Vevé are symbols that are drawn during rituals, they are symbols that
identify the Loa to which they refer, they are magic symbols, sacred symbols, they are
the language with which the serviteur communicates with his divinities. Iron is an
element linked to a Loa in particular: Ogun Ferraile. This deity was very important for the
Haitian revolution, it is important for every revolution, personal or community, political or
social. Artistic.

The Recovery Plan_ Museo MA*GA
A Sueño, 2020. fried cotton paper, lightbox.
The dream can be a state of the soul. Often, in many African traditions, it is said that in a
dream one's spirit can return to one's village, one's city, one's home. In the dream, spirits
and gods can give messages, suggest choices, dispel doubts. After certain rituals,
having wet your body and head with certain herbs and having eaten certain foods,
Babalorixà, Babalawo, Hounon, Mambo or Iyalorixà suggest to pay much attention to the
dream of the coming night, a door has opened, you must welcome the guest. The dream
speaks through sound, sensation, image; perfect ally of an oral culture that
communicates with every world to which we belong. Often it was through the dream that
the victims of the slave trade returned home, warming the hearts of their sons and
daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers. Brothers and sisters. In the dream,
very often our Petit Bon Ange, as they say in Haiti, or our Orì, as they say in Yorubaland
and all its diasporas, communicate to us things in everyday life that we cannot grasp.
The dream is a way to see with our eyes closed.
Shelter, Symbols of protection, 2020. tamarind, USB drive, bristles, pigment.
African ritual sculptures contain a knowledge, readable only by those who understand
their non-verbal grammar, evident only for those who can read symbols and see the
invisible. The sculptures that Western people called, glimpsing only the surface,
"fetishes", are complex meanings carved in the wood from hands that have learned
movements that thousands of other hands before them had made. The representation of
the divine, the hidden, the immaterial. These objects are custodians of a wisdom
therefore, a philosophical/spiritual usb key that can be consulted only by those who
respect its tradition and ethics, by those who know its principles and follow its precepts.
To them offerings are made, these sculptures are not divinities, as an un-careful eye had
thought in the past, but they are "an antenna", an intermediary between the Orun and
the Aiyé, between the material and the immaterial. The Afrocentric traditions and
philosophies are well anchored to the past but are aimed at the future, knowing how to
move in time and space, because they are transmitted by the languages of men who live
in the present, and not engraved on immobile stones. Ogun, god of iron and innovation
is now linked to technology, because African gods do not observe their people far away
from a mythical past, but walk beside them, preceding them by a few steps.