LONDON, United Kingdom — The shift from in-person to virtual has been swift, to say the least. But video conferencing and live streaming have become a part of the way forward and thankfully, the quality of virtual programming has significantly improved over the past six months. This week marks the launch of Homecoming Festival - an entirely digital conference of expert panels, educational workshops, and exclusive fashion collections connecting Africa to the world.

Conceived by the artist management team behind Skepta and Octavian, this annual forum launched IRL in 2018 in Lagos celebrating Nigerian talents across various disciplines, including studio visits with Victor Sozaboy and Nike Art Gallery and fireside chats with Mowalola and Sharmadean Reid. This year’s installment in its all-digital version has not affected the overall quality of content and in fact, Homecoming Festival joins a growing list of online-only forums specifically dedicated to diaspora creatives across art, music, fashion, film, sport, and entertainment. In the past few months, The Folklore hosted a virtual conference The Drawing Board in February, ICON360 toasted their launch with a Fashion Experience in May, and Tastemakers Africa's The Thread curated a series of conversations with their continental counterparts following The Year of Return in Ghana.

On a more individual basis, creatives from London to New York have held court via Instagram Live, taking you behind the scenes of epic projects such as Zerina Akers and Kwasi Fordjour of ‘BLACK IS KING’ or the cross-disciplinary chats between stylist Ade Samuel and new-wave musician Mereba or even career how-to’s with Solange Franklin-Reed and her rise to styling Tracee Ellis Ross and Zazie Beetz amongst others.

These forums are even more critically important as more established forums targeting a mainstream audience tend to minimize or tokenize the black experience. When diaspora creatives are centered, the primary focus becomes everything else outside of a racial identifier. The substance of the work takes the forefront.

While the topics are broad with perhaps too many panelists, we are intrigued to hear from Niyi Okuboyejo of Post-Imperial, who has been patiently crafting handmade adire shirts and accessories on the continent and Angelo Baque of AWAKE NY who moves at his own pace with interests deeply rooted in community building. Homecoming Festival is in partnership with British multi-brand retailer Browns, which will sell exclusive fashion collections in its Shoreditch location as well as online. The virtual format allows for distinct voices separated by geographic distance to commune and challenge one another in a truly extraordinary way.

This week also marks the unveiling of two new American Vogue covers fronted by black artists — the iconic Kerry James Marshall (for whom we still aspire for a true fashion collaboration with Wales Bonner) who painted a fictional woman in an Off-White dress and the portraitist Jordan Casteel, who captured Aurora James of Brother Vellies draped in a blue Pyer Moss gown. Both artists depicted the theme of hope in an unprecedented way; unprecedented in that Vogue as a massive platform gave way for two visionaries, who otherwise may not have had the opportunity, to represent a depth of blackness beyond the margins and unabashedly centered.

In a similar vein, Vanity Fair enlisted the guest editorship of Ta-Nehisi Coates for its September issue, whose cover commissioned artist Amy Sherald to debut a work memorializing the wrongfully slain Breonna Taylor. In this current gut-wrenching period, as in many others, artists stand to speak out with and/or against the times, to reimagine an alternate space or place, and to amplify voices for those unable to speak. These covers fulfill just that. That they coincide with the collective urgency of these virtual forums reminds us of the varied ways in which creative expression plays an integral part in resistance to the struggle.

Lead photo courtesy of Homecoming Festival / @ourhomecoming.