Book presentation of “Black Meme. Decolonizzare il digitale”

On the occasion of the first Italian presentation of Black Meme. Decolonizzare il digitale*, published by wetlands in Italian translation, Legacy Russell — award-winning author of Glitch Feminism — will be in dialogue with Markus Reymann.

Through a genealogy of images — from lynching postcards to the Selma protests, from Tommie Smith's salute to the Rodney King case — Russell shows how the representation of blackness has shaped contemporary visual culture. Without the "black meme," the digital as we know it would not exist. An investigation that invites us to radically rethink authorship and virality, both on and off the web.

*Original title: Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us
(Verso Books, 2024). Italian translation: Isabella Pasqualetto,
wetlands, 2025.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. She is the executive director of The Kitchen, one of the most innovative contemporary art institutions in the USA. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, internet idolatry, and the ritualism of new media. Her first book, Glitch Feminism: a Manifesto (translated in Italy by Perrone in 2021), redefined the relationship between feminism and the digital world. Legacy Russell has received numerous literary and artistic awards, including the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art (2019), the Rauschenberg Residency Fellow (2020), the Creative Capital Award (2021), the Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow (2022), the Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow (2023), and the Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow (2024-25). In 2025, she published her first book of poetry, Gay Pompeii (GenderFail, 2025). Black Meme, first published in English by Verso Books in 2024, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Markus Reymann is Co-Director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, a leading international art and advocacy foundation created in 2002 by the philanthropist, art patron, and ocean advocate Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, representing the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts and public service. TBA21 is based in Madrid, working in association with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and has other key hubs in Venice, Italy, and Portland, Jamaica. In 2011, together with Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Markus co-founded TBA21–Academy, the foundation’s research arm that fosters deeper relationships with the Earth’s hydrosphere and its extended ecologies through the lens of art to activate new forms of care and collective action. Markus initiated and conducted numerous expeditions, designed in collaboration with invited artists, curators, scientists, and thinkers, to conduct cross-disciplinary field research and commission ambitious projects informed by the itinerary of the research vessel Dardanella.