Black Archive Alliance is a platform dedicated to archival research and sharing focused on Black history in Italian archives.

Started in 2018 Black Archive Alliance is a research and training project that aims to highlight a selection of documents that reflect the realities and histories of African populations, their diaspora and their representation across in a series of archives and public and private collections. The first edition created a virtual map of this archival presence in the city with a catalog that aims to support future research by providing perspectives that foster reflection.

Over the past years Black Archive Alliance has excavated, simultaneously, those things officially considered a part of the archive, and those elements, images and objects that are part of personal legacies that ultimately reflect and signify beyond the individual. It is a platform that is as concerned with all of those fragments not considered worth saving or documenting by the writers of historical canons and all of the things that have been documented, only to remain sheltered and preserved away from the public eye and discussion, rarely if ever resurfaced and hardly contemplated. 

In rescuing these fragments, the aim is to connect them and rereading them against wider histories of oppression, marginalization and systemic racism, while affirming their agency and centrality, as well as their afterlives and fundamental role in imagining an ethical and desirable future. In 2021 Black Archive Alliance initiated a permanent residency with Murate Art District hosting research, exhibitions and public programming connecting Africa and its diaspora to Italian archival traces. A section of The Recovery Plan has been designated to host ongoing research and the platform has featured in each of our Pop up versions of the center fostering a broad sharing of the material and research. In fall of 2021 Jessica Sartiani became the first research fellow connected with the residency at Murate. Sartiani, whose research focused on coffee and its colonial legacy, orchestrated five events and curated an exhibition of the research. Efforts are currently underway to digitize this platform rendering the materials accessible.