NYU Florence’s Villa La Pietra has remarkable collections of art, music, books, and a beautiful garden. It will now be sharing these treasures virtually, having joined the local #museichiusimuseiaperti campaign, which involves Florentine museums and cultural institutions, with the hashtag #ActonsGoingVirtual. A new story or insights from the NYU Florence collection will appear regularly on the Villa La Pietra website and on the Instagram account.
At this time of forced isolation, the campaign allows Villa La Pietra to be open and available virtually as a site of learning, exchange, discussion and meaning. Francesca Baldry, Acton Collection Manager at Villa La Pietra believes this “befits” the Villa, which has been welcoming visitors, both foreign and local, since the Renaissance. Villa La Pietra was bequest to NYU by the Acton family. According to Francesca, “the Actons were masters at welcoming guests from all over the world and always had great stories.” While welcoming guests to Villa La Pietra, the Actions fostered a sense of intellectual community and shared their passion for culture and ideas at the heart of their vision for NYU Florence.
Virtually opening the doors of Villa La Pietra and sharing the collection in this way is a continuation of a tradition started by the Actons and continued by NYU Florence. The stories will feature Acton family members, events that have happened at Villa La Pietra, objects from the collection, books, photographs, or rooms in the Villa or locations in the garden. This will also be an interactive initiative, with readers and viewers having an opportunity to share their own stories. Francesca is excited about this aspect of the initiative, saying, “Culture doesn’t stop, stay with us, and tell us your novella!” She adds that “the series will also remain on our website as a memory of our resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when we have used culture and our imagination to feel vital despite forced physical isolation.”
“What would Martin Luther King do if he were here today in our Latin America? With no doubt, he would certainly be denouncing the inequality that affects black populations, claiming for them to have fairer working conditions. He would be inspiring us. He would be making history.”
So writes Anny Ocoró Loango, professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences whose scholarship focuses on ethnic-racial issues, and presenter at a panel discussion, The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., From the Argentine Context, heldin early February. Centered around the topic of inclusion, NYU Buenos Aires (NYUBA) hosted the event, which was organized by the United States Embassy in Argentina.
Convening academic and practitioner perspectives, the panelists also included: Madoda Ntaka, an anti-discrimination attorney; Miriam Gomes, president and co-founder of the Diáspora Africana en la Argentina (DIAFAR) and scholar on the influence of African culture in Argentinian society; and Nengumbi Sukama, founder and executive director of the Argentine Institute for Equality, Diversity and Integration (IARPIDI). From legal, academic, and human rights perspectives, the panelists considered how Dr. King would address the current struggles of Afro-descendants, and how his legacy has informed the work of activists historically and today. An audience of embassy personnel, members of Afro-Argentine advocacy organizations, city of Buenos Aires representatives, as well as members of the NYU community, came together to engage in open-format conversations with the presenters.
“The space itself allowed for people of color, as myself, to feel heard in a safe room with others that acknowledge the plight of sticking out in a country that has done a lot in the past to white wash certain parts of history,” said Fanny Yayi Bondje, a junior studying away at NYUBA in the Global Liberal Studies program with a concentration in Politics, Human Rights, and Development. “The panelists were vulnerable and shared stories where they have been targeted with racist acts and words by neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers on the street. They have used those experiences to make them fight harder for what’s right and have been inspired by activists all around the world, such as Dr. Martin Luther King. They shared some of their favorite quotes from Dr. King but they also shared the names and legacies of influential Afro Argentines figures, who are often not talked about in history or today. For example, Bernardino Rivadavia, the first Argentine president was of Afro-descent.”
“To talk about leaders and activists who gave their life for equality, justice and integration is a way of disseminating their legacy to our generation and future ones to come,” said South African and Argentine lawyer Madoda Ntaka. Providing pro-bono work on anti discrimination cases to the Afro-descendant community, he hopes to promote justice and increase understanding of racial issues in the City of Buenos Aires.
Growing up in an environment of activism, Ntaka’s father Simon “Blues” Kotsi Ntaka, was a musician and militant from South Africa. “[He] also fought for the rights of those in the African Diaspora. As an active member of the African National Congress, he dedicated his life to fighting the apartheid system in South Africa until 1965, when he was forced into exile in Argentina. […] So I feel connected with the struggle that many African and Afro-American leaders have undertaken in the US, Africa and the Americas as a whole.”
The topics of inclusion, diversity, belonging, and equity (IDBE), said Site Director Anna Kazumi Stahl, inform some of the events and academic projects at NYUBA, including Fall 2019 Global Equity Fellow Brian Ruiz’s collaboration with three local experts — Sandra Chaga, Cleonice Da Silva, and Maria Isabel Soares — on a workshop on the history, dance, and culinary culture of Afro-Descendants. “IBDE is a deeply important issue — indeed a core concern — for us in BA. Many staff and faculty have a heightened experience of such and engage in research and/or activism vis-a-vis this theme. At the same time, we very much want to continue to develop more ways to bring attention to these themes as they play out in this local context.”
The panelists agreed that one of the major problems today is the lack of education about the long history of Afro-Argentine presence and their contributions to the country. Reflecting on the ideas discussed, Bondje noted, “I can only imagine how much could change if children in schools were taught about them and could see them in this beautiful way, how different Argentina would look today.”
Next week, James D. Fernández, site director of NYU Madrid and professor of Spanish Literature and Culture, and Luis Argeo, a journalist and filmmaker from Asturias, Spain, will launch a fascinating multi-media exhibit that takes the viewer on the personal journeys of emigrants who settled in the US generations ago.
From the 23rd of January to the 12th of April, the Invisible Emigrants exhibit will be on hosted at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid, Spain. Read more in excerpts from the brochure below, on the exhibit’s blog, Spanish Immigrants in the United States, and Facebook Group (also titled Spanish Immigrants in the United States).
Out of invisibility: about the project
Tens of thousands of working-class Spaniards emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their story is largely unknown, invisible, in both Spain and the US. For the last ten years, [Fernández and Argeo] have been struggling to make this story visible, before it disappears for good. They’ve knocked on doors all over Spain and the US, gaining permission to digitize and analyze family archives, and rescuing from rusty cookie tins and crumbling family albums, the primary sources that chronicle the quiet heroism of the protagonists of this forgotten diaspora.
The project
Now, with the support and leadership of the Fundación Consejo España – EE. UU., Fernández and Argeo are embarking on their most ambitious project to date: serving as the curators of a major, multi-media exhibition, which will open in Madrid in January, 2020 at Madrid’s Centro Cultural Conde Duque, before traveling around Spain and the US. The exhibition will use the photographs, documents, film footage and objects they found in the homes of the descendants of immigrants, in order to reconstruct the textures and trials, the spirit and sentiment, of this fascinating but almost lost chapter in the history of immigration and in the history Spain-US relations.
The Fundación Consejo España – EE. UU. was created in 1997 to strengthen links between Spanish and American society and institutions, to promote mutual understanding and joint ventures of all sorts between the two countries.
Diseñar América: El trazado español de los Estados Unidos–Designing America: Spain’s Imprint in the US was the first major exhibition project created and promoted by the foundation. This prestigious show, which opened at the National Library in Madrid and has traveled to Washington D.C., Houston (TX), Santa Barbara (CA) and San Antonio (TX), allowed the foundation to consolidate experience and “know how” in managing cultural exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
With this experience under our belt, the Fundación – in collaboration with Madrid City Council – has now assumed the production, management, and seed sponsorship of the exhibition Invisible Emigrants, with the firm conviction that this new project will make visible a fascinating and unknown shared history, and advance the core mission of our organization.
To date, the exhibition is sponsored by New York University and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center Foundation of NYU; the Spanish companies Técnicas Reunidas and Navantia; the United States Embassy in Spain and the Franklin Institute of the University of Alcalá de Henares (University Institute for Research on North America).
NYU Florence’s Villa La Pietra has remarkable collections of art, music, books, and a beautiful garden. It will now be sharing these treasures virtually, having joined the local #museichiusimuseiaperti campaign, which involves Florentine museums and cultural institutions, with the hashtag #ActonsGoingVirtual. A new story or insights from the NYU Florence collection will appear regularly on the Villa La Pietra website and on the Instagram account. 
Virtually opening the doors of Villa La Pietra and sharing the collection in this way is a continuation of a tradition started by the Actons and continued by NYU Florence. The stories will feature Acton family members, events that have happened at Villa La Pietra, objects from the collection, books, photographs, or rooms in the Villa or locations in the garden. This will also be an interactive initiative, with readers and viewers having an opportunity to share their own stories. Francesca is excited about this aspect of the initiative, saying, “Culture doesn’t stop, stay with us, and tell us your novella!” She adds that “the series will also remain on our website as a memory of our resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when we have used culture and our imagination to feel vital despite forced physical isolation.”
