Black to the Future. Arte contemporanea e pratiche creative dell'abbigliamento in Africa. Introduzione

Clothing practices in contemporary art, in fashion, and in the aesthetics of everyday life are spaces in which one becomes visible, negotiates and imposes oneself, remodelling the shapes of one’s body and one’s field of action. Artists who work on the material and symbolic transformations of the body that arise from clothing practices can offer an important glimpse into the transformations taking place in Africa and the Diaspora. Both in Africa and abroad, they experiment with new ways of creating individual and collective bodies and alternative relationship models through interplays of compositions and decompositions, combinations and contrasts, the new and the old. In this regard, they act as “cultural mediators” who imaginatively and creatively capture the most widely-spread lifestyles and cultural sensibilities, prefiguring new and different lifestyles in a context that is increasingly mobile and precarious. The temporal dimension evoked by the title of this issue – Black to the Future – that refers to Zemeckis’ famous film, underlines the fundamental relationship between past and future that marks every process of change, when legacies and aspirations are weighed and measured as communities shape their journeys. The articles included in this issue – essays and reports of analytic experiences by artists and researchers – investigate the relationship that links contemporary art and creative self-styling and fashion in Africa and its diaspora. From different vantages the contributions comment on the important role of clothing for individual and identity claims, political positioning, and socio-economic emancipation in the global black. community. They highlight the entwining of scrutiny and operation, inciting a look into social, cultural and economic dynamics that demand a positioning and awareness of the political stakes at play in black sartorial practices. Moreover, by putting the dressed body at the forefront, they foreground individual and collective agency. The black styled body becomes the privileged site of identity pride, of exchanges, appropriations and border crossings that script one’s life. Several contributions remark on the importance of the economic dimension and the osmosis between contemporary art and clothing practices that has led to the emergence of cultural entrepreneurs that are both artists and stylists and are often politically engaged. The social relevance of fashion and art, which is evidenced by the visibility and influence these figures enjoy and by their ability to create and disseminate iconic consumer products, supports and indeed aids the forging of relationships, identities, lives, anticipating or interpreting cultural trends.