Angelica Pesarini: Justin, we have known each other for almost ten years now and have collaborated in various ways. I am very excited to share this dialogue with you on a theme that lies at the core of our work and that also deeply connects with the topic of this special feature: the excavation of Black presence from the rubble of Eurocentric knowledge production. I would like to highlight three keywords to frame our conversation: recovery, repair, and reparation. These words are central to our work. And I would like to begin with the first, recovery. In Florence, Italy, after years of effort, we now have The Recovery Plan, a research center, cultural depository, and exhibition space for the arts, to which you have contributed significantly. It also functions as a library and archive for the study of Afro-descendent cultures. The Recovery Plan’s website describes it as “a space for critical thinking to rectify historical inaccuracy and to recover histories that still await narration” (Recovery Plan). Could you elaborate on this aspect and share the journey that led you to create a space dedicated to recovery?

Justin Randolph Thompson: Between 2010 and 2016, there seemed to be more activity, particularly in academic contexts, concerning the Black presence in Italy across historical periods, including in the Renaissance. This was, I think, indicative of a certain kind of conversation happening. I had the opportunity to meet many scholars who were doing that work—for example, Kate Lowe; Paul Kaplan, in the realm of art history; Pape Diaw and Andrew Ndukuba, in relation to local socially grounded initiatives; and Awam Amkpa, who was developing the exhibition ReSignifications. I began to encounter people approaching this issue from an activist standpoint and an artistic standpoint. I started to connect the dots around two key points. First, given that the voices were there, what was really needed was a forum to engage in these conversations. Second, through my travels to the United States, I found that among scholars, Italy was too often unimaginable as a site for Black cultural production or as a place to engage with Black history.

These realizations, I believe, are what produced a more meaningful push. I came toward this as an artist who has consistently engaged in historical research and one who is always seeking to influence the world of culture, to change the cultural panorama, something imparted to me in my upbringing. Then, encountering people like Andre Halyard and discussing basic, street-level strategies to initiate conversations and activate networks—that is what led to the founding of Black History Month Florence, in 2016. After the first edition, with Janine Gaëlle Dieudji joining me in the administration and envisioning of the initiative’s form, we realized we needed more than a platform that happened once a year as a month-long celebration across different spaces. First, we needed a more comprehensive forum, because the histories we were addressing were dynamic and broad, as were the methodologies we wanted to put into action. Second, we needed a center—a hub that would allow us to build community—because we wanted more direct participatory community for our work and we really needed help in shaping its vision.

The Recovery Plan was born from those desires. It was designed to respond to requests from people like Pape Diaw, a Senegalese activist based in Florence since the 1970s, who repeatedly emphasized, from the very first day I met him, that people of African descent needed a space to come together and build community without asking permission. Those pushes were central to our desire to formalize this effort. Ultimately, the space was born as a library, a community center, a gallery dedicated to artistic research, a space for children’s activities, and a site for developing and cultivating new approaches to cultural production, event making, and archival research. We were working with a broad range of people (students, activists, artists), and we understood firmly that we did not necessarily need exclusively the perspective of a historian to engage in conversations about history. In marginalized histories, which are so underserved, it is crucial to recognize that many historians are simply not doing this work.

AP: This is an important point.

JRT: Yes, and something we have discussed extensively is the question of who carries out this work in the absence of scholars who are formally expected to occupy these positions and conduct this research. The Recovery Plan embodies that effort. All my work is guided by two principles: invitation and critique. It is essential that all of this serve as a form of invitation—to join, to engage in a particular type of work, to participate, and to understand that, regardless of your background or interests, this is for you. At the same time, it must operate as a critique of the systems of power that have long excluded our participation and erased our histories.

AP: As you were speaking, I was reflecting on how we can think of recovery, particularly the recovery of Black presence. The so-called Renaissance (a term already laden with Eurocentric assumptions) is often perceived as white, and within it Black presence remains largely invisible and overlooked. I am not thinking white just in terms of race but also materially white. In Florence, where I used to live and where we met almost ten years ago, there is an overwhelming presence of white marble. That is immediately associated with the Renaissance, without considering how that marble was produced or the labor involved in its extraction and transportation. It is important to reflect on how we might excavate other stories from such heavy marble, and I think some of the projects we have collaborated on went precisely in that direction. I think of the Sky Arts documentary film written by Francesca Priori and aptly titled The Black Italian Renaissance. This project, which investigates questions of race and racialization in the Renaissance, situates Black presence at the center, uncovering stories of African people living in fifteenth-century Florence through the analysis of oil paintings. I also think about your phenomenal curatorial work in the two editions of On Being Present, an online exhibition dedicated to uncovering the Black presence in the Uffizi Gallery’s collection, which became the most visited online exhibition of the Uffizi. What strategies and plans can we conceive to highlight a presence that has always been there?

JRT: I think that is a great point. Recovery, in relation to The Recovery Plan, is simultaneously about the past and the present. It is about going back and gathering—recovering—the fragments of history that have been overlooked, undernarrated, marginalized, considered not important, removed from any form of canon, and excluded from the viable avenues of academic discourse. It is about recovering those fragments, but it is also—and this is the crucial part—about recovery as a society from those absences. Those absences affect every single person. A fragmented, undernarrated history shapes our cultural values; it determines what we go on to study and how we spend our lives. What happens, unfortunately, is that many people still believe the removal of these histories, which have indeed been removed and invisibilized, only affects people of African descent, Black people, or Africans. This is not true. The implications of having a fragmented understanding of history in relation to a geography—like Italy’s—where people of African descent have always been present are deeply significant.

Some of this also falls on the academic context, and on scholars, more specifically, because gatekeeping structures are positioned to maintain a facade around history. This is particularly true in relation to the Renaissance, as you noted. The Renaissance, especially in Florence, where I have lived for the past twenty-five years, is the dominant narrative of this space. It is held up as a guiding light. Yet, there is not even truly an interest in a broad view of the Renaissance but rather in upholding a very specific narrative of it, one that is understood and described as white, that venerates figures representing extreme power and wealth without questioning where that wealth came from, what their connections were to global movements of trade, or what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.

As a visual artist, it is striking for me to see how this shapes the discourse around art in the contemporary Italian context. When art history is narrated as the story of patrons—the people who paid for the work—and their commissioning of artists who became important by serving them, what emerges is a history of propaganda. Works are celebrated for how they convey victories and power. If art and art history are framed in this way, then it becomes very difficult for an artist working today to come to terms with that power dynamic within the largely white art world. This framework allows institutions to continue speaking the language of benevolence, inviting participation into their spaces, while maintaining the same structures. This is a troubling narration of artists, and that is without even considering the whitewashing that feeds into it as well. There remains very little interest in or consciousness of a Black presence, whether in the past or in the present.

We have had many conversations about different historical periods and the through lines that can be traced across them. That is part of the reason I mention our contemporary moment. But I think there is also something important to say about the kind of analysis you engage in of the construction of race through a colonial lens and of the ways in which much of that language and its implications can be found in earlier historical periods. You have often spoken about this, but I wonder if you could expand on how moving from the realm of sociology into the realm of art history has shaped your own perspective and how you see those connections carry over across periods and disciplines.

AP: Certainly, my background in social sciences allowed me to look at issues of race in the early modern period through a different lens. For me, the focus is on the power dynamics that enable the marginalization of certain subjects based on ideas of racialization and gender, for instance. These structures do not suddenly materialize; they do not appear in a vacuum. That is why I find the idea of “race before race” particularly useful. Even if there was not something called “race,” there were “interconnected discourses, languages, and practices” that laid the groundwork for what came later, as Matthieu Chapman argues (see also Heng 23). These connections are not just overlooked but often rejected in surprisingly irrational manners despite a facade of scientificity and rigor. However, tracing these temporal connections is important, because their significance helps us to navigate the present. For instance, considering Alessandro de’ Medici not just as an isolated figure but as part of a broader network of Black presence in Florence and in Europe allows me to investigate who was deemed visible and who was considered invisible, and this complexity is rarely reflected in history or art history textbooks. Also, working with you and Francesca on the material for The Black Italian Renaissance made me think about my connections, as an Afro-Italian, with this network. While we were shooting the documentary, I was living in the heart of Florence, and it struck me that centuries earlier many Black people had walked the same streets and gazed upon the same buildings I passed each day. At the time, I could not fully grasp the power and impact of that presence because I lacked the tools to recognize it.

It also led me to think about questions of legacies and broken ties. Going back to Alessandro de’ Medici—he was an Afro-Italian man born to a white Italian father and a mother of African descent. He had children, who had children in turn. This is a legacy that belongs to me as well, though it is a legacy I was unaware of for a long time. There are many broken ties with the Black presence and Black history, and recovering and repairing those ties is important for people of African descendant in Italy, since our stories are often invisibilized. We are placed in a perennial and anachronistic “second-generation” state. Discussing the Black presence in the Renaissance is therefore highly relevant for contemporary Italy. I believe the past is never completely past, and understanding race in the 1500s illuminates the continuities that made possible the later construction of Italy as a “white” nation during its colonial period. This did not happen in a vacuum; it was the result of a long historical process. Yet, epistemically, there are many gaps, and I think the work we are doing, both academically and in the arts, aims to excavate these connections and continuities beneath the rubble of a Eurocentric and patriarchal idea of history.

JRT: It is interesting to think about figures like Alessandro de’ Medici, and I think it is important to consider the full spectrum of society at the time. There were people of African descent among the most powerful and among the enslaved, and everywhere in between. This broader spectrum is often lost when considering Black history. Many people unfamiliar with that period tend to focus primarily on enslavement and slavery. While that dimension is crucial and still requires extensive research, there is a much wider spectrum that also demands study, offering a more complete understanding of the range of representation during that period. In the context of the academy, we are often confronted with legacies of coloniality in how disciplines are separated, how knowledge is structured, and how knowledge production is recognized or disregarded. These frameworks within academic research and historical disciplines can become significant hurdles, preventing this history from appearing in the first place. It is important to consider how these systemic structures have shaped what is studied, understood, and valued.

AP: Yes. I think, for me at least, it’s important to deconstruct what knowledge is, where it comes from, how it is used, and who decides what counts as “knowledge.” I have realized that the knowledge I am most interested in often cannot be found in textbooks. This became clear to me while collecting oral histories of Black “mixed race” Italian women born to African mothers and fascist fathers during the Italian occupation of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia (1889–1960), like my own grandmother. While studying Italian colonialism, I read many books, but somehow, I did not see myself represented. My story was absent, even though I am part of that history. This was a profound experience—reading and searching for my history, only to find it missing, while my own body was there, serving as an archive, telling me the story of colonialism that I could not see in the documents (Pesarini). I turned toward the stories, the voices, and the gaps. The archive became an important site for me, not for what it contained but for what was absent, who was not spoken of, who could not speak, all the missing information, all the scraps, fragments, and initials (Alshaibi; Hartman; Fuentes). Collecting these fragments and being fortunate enough to meet Black women who were born in East Africa between 1916 and 1974 had provided alternative narratives to the official documents. This was transformative. The archive presented a linear, orderly story, but it was incomplete. Listening to voices and the lived experience revealed a different kind of knowledge, a different narrative. Certain bodies can be considered living archives of colonialism, shaped by its history, and this perspective offers insights that the official archive—capital A—tries to suppress.

JRT: The Black Italian Renaissance and On Being Present—these projects have been about the implications and limitations of simply being present. What led me toward all of it was, quite simply, arriving in Italy from the United States as a Black artist and trying to find my bearings. I experienced a certain sentiment in relation to the museums around me: I did not feel welcome, I did not feel represented. Despite their being full of art, they did not feel like spaces for me, as an artist. I needed something else to draw me into those spaces; otherwise, I would simply have avoided them. Encountering Black figures on the facades of buildings and on the streets of Florence hinted at what I might find in the museums. Yet, upon entering those museums and seeing Black figures in almost all of them, I found that the accompanying texts and textbooks provided no information. These absences revealed how silences are maintained. As someone who is not an art historian, walking through a museum and analyzing visual elements allows one to begin understanding the iconographies, narratives, and groupings present, but the absence of textual information raises profound questions.

After nearly twenty years of this experience, I was fortunate to begin encountering the few scholars of art history who were doing profound work on Black and African presence in Italian Renaissance art—not only that, but scholars genuinely interested in perspectives like mine, that were not necessarily grounded in the academy. They were open to perspectives I could bring, based on my own knowledge of history, on my understanding of the social context, of artistic production, and of the role of the academy in marginalizing histories. That openness was a breath of fresh air, especially given a certain disdain I had often felt toward museums and academic structures. Those few figures represented an open door in spaces where the door had always seemed closed, locked, and guarded. It is crucial to recognize how even that basic encouragement transformed into rigorous engagement and a desire to share knowledge with as many people as possible. This highlights how the academy is both a resource and a limit: while we turn to it for learning, there remain significant gaps that must be addressed through independent inquiry and engagement.

AP: It is interesting to consider the connection between the archive and the museum. From our own perspectives, spending time in archives and museums, it is important to ask, Can we resignify these spaces? Can we rethink museums and archives? We cannot erase contemporary museums that were former colonial institutions, but can we really resignify these spaces and their collections, even if it is difficult? What do you think about the possibility of resignifying museums and archives?

JRT: Resignifying museums and archives requires acknowledgment on the part of the institutions themselves. Recognition of the problem is the starting point, but often defense mechanisms emerge instead, fueled by fear. Former colonial museums often frame objects in ways that remove the possibility of engaging culturally with what they truly are. The information collected about these materials tends to focus on provenance rather than historical analysis or understanding the material itself. Museums create their own fragility by constructing narratives that act as facades. Behind these facades is exclusion, destruction, and violence. In ethnographic museums, in particular, much of the critical knowledge connected to the collection is not held by the staff; gatekeeping prevents exploration, examination, and discussion. Resignifying is about not allowing these collections to “choke” and die, as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the art curator and director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, says in his analysis of the Humboldt Forum (3). Intervention is necessary to reveal the stories of the materials and the histories of the institutions themselves. Resignification requires acknowledging the role and importance of these objects and radically reconsidering them.

AP: Museums and archives also seek to control the knowledge we get access to and what can be kept absent. Even when objects are tamed behind glass or frames, we can still perceive their social life, and sometimes objects do speak back through their own materiality. I am thinking of decay, contamination, or other traces, chemical reactions that modify the object and consequently the narrative that object is supposed to convey. Restoration, as Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor argue, can also be seen as an attempt to erase an uncomfortable narrative (465), and I feel like something similar happens in academia too: inconvenient stories, the ones that disrupt the master narratives, often get neglected or pushed aside in order to restore a cleaner, more coherent version of history that fits a certain idea of how things should look.

JRT: Yes, absolutely. And two things come to mind. Ethnographic collections demonstrate how easily objects are rendered alien within the Western lens for viewing art. We sometimes forget that when we walk through spaces like the Uffizi, we are looking at works where the function has been removed. The vast majority of those works were originally either in somebody’s palace, trying to speak to a very elite audience, or inside churches. Placed in a museum, they do not hold that ritual role anymore, and the social and political role too has been transformed. The same occurs with Renaissance works: the function and context of the objects are removed. Considering a painting as it was originally used—such as in a church service—changes how we interpret it and shifts the focus of veneration. And it is fascinating, I think, to consider how even just that retelling is a way to resignify what we are looking at in the first place.

AP: Justin, to conclude, I am thinking about how recovery is deeply connected to reparations—not only financial but intimate, emotional reparations. Jonas Tinius and I, inspired by the work of the artist Kader Attia, focused on the idea of (ir)reparability and how the processes of repairing cannot begin if not through a recognition of the potential impossibility of healing (Pesarini and Tinius). How do we acknowledge that some histories will never be fully recovered and repaired?

JRT: It is a tough one. I have been thinking for a long time about how to concisely understand what I am interested in—all the layers of the work that I engage in—and in 2018, when I was invited through Villa Romana to do a residency in Sinthian, Senegal at Thread, I sat down with an artisan who was carving an axe handle using an axe handle that he had carved.Footnote ¹ I was fascinated by the fact that he was producing a tool using a similar tool that he himself had produced. I think if every tool that we produce is capable of making new tools, then we are doing the right thing.

AP: Yes. That, in essence, embodies recovery.