Pulse: Celebrating 25 Years of Africa e Mediterraneo BHMF in collaboration with Le Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea Co-Curated by Abigail J. Covington and Camila Mecagani Throughout the past few decades, there’s been an increase in the rate and frequency of migrations of people in African nations to various European countries. Italy, lying at the heart of Mediterranean, has become home to over one million African immigrants. For 25 years, Africa e Mediterraneo has established a creative, productive, and ongoing dialogue between the two locations. Europe and Africa are greatly differing continents. Both house a population of unimaginable diversity in race, culture, and experience. Yet, Africa e Mediterraneo has been able to beautifully capture that depth of diversity in each of its issues. In its representation of the African Diasporic community, internally in Africa and externally in Europe, the magazine has been able to highlight the cross-cultural dialogue and interaction between both communities. While there are moments of harmony and tension, Africa e Mediterraneo has masterfully curated the duality of that experience into a medium that speaks to a mass audience. This exhibit exists to showcase the work and powerful storytelling that the journal has accomplished over the quarter-century of its existence. Combining the stories and narratives of blackness in a variety of spaces, Africa e Mediterraneo has been able to cultivate a unifying space for the masses to understand the dynamic experience of the black identity in a country anchored by eurocentrism. The theme or idea of “pulse” was taken as a rhetorical and visual argument that Africa e Mediterraneo knows and understands the “pulse”, or state, of the relationship between African Diasporic communities and Italy. The assembly of the magazines replicates that of a heart monitor, raising issues that are at the climax, or higher pulse of social conversations and integrating them amongst more mediated topics that are equally important and assist in communicating the state of the black identity in Italy in the past, present, and future.
