The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) remains the largest uprising led by enslaved people and the only one to end in victory for the insurgents–an “unthinkable” event, long relegated to the margins of western thought, in a world founded on racial hierarchies, the traffic in enslaved people and colonialism. Haiti represented a radical political experiment, offering new ways of imagining freedom, citizenship and sovereignty.

Its history is intertwined with a global story of revolutions, migrations, and nation-building–and also with the stories of Italy and Bergamo. Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, a native of Bergamo, was born in an Italian peninsula still divided into many states. In 1826, he traveled to Haiti in search of examples of nationhood. There, he found a nation committed to building a new political community in spite of ongoing threats from France.

The tensions of this process were reflected in institutional changes: in 1805, Haiti adopted an imperial constitution that yoked citizenship to black identity, overturning racial hierarchies; in 1807, it witnessed territorial division; in 1811, the former revolutionary general Henry Christophe, born into slavery, proclaimed himself king of northern Haiti. Upon Beltrami’s arrival, Haiti had once again reunified into a single republic and incorporated new territories.

While Beltrami collected documents and artifacts to write the history of the first “black republic,” former Queen Marie-Louise, Christophe’s widow, crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction, finding refuge in Pisa. She lived a secluded life, but continued to embody the “unthinkable” Haitian experiment. The first African-descendant queen in the Americas and the symbolic mother of the nation, she survived the fall of the kingdom and subsequent political experiments.

Marie-Louise’s story has never truly been written, just like the story of Haiti that Beltrami left unfinished. Imagining a Nation retraces their intertwined paths to reflect on the meaning of nationhood, both real and imagined. Both Beltrami and Marie-Louise pursued a project of rasanblaj: a Haitian Kreyòl term describing a process of (re-)assembly. As the inaugural exhibition of the Building a Black Nation project, the exhibition is inspired by this concept of reassembly, bringing together archival fragments, historically-informed costumes and installations by Haitian artists from the diaspora to resurrect forgotten histories and transform them into living memory.