Black Quantum Futurism

Imagining De-gentrified Futures

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Curated by Betty Yu

Virtual Opening and Tour: Nov. 4, 2020 6 pm RSVP Here.

On view Thurs. - Sat. 1 pm - 6 pm
Nov. 5 - Dec. 19, 2020
3D Online and at 291 Church Street, NYC

Featuring Work By:
Black Quantum Futurism
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Chinatown Art Brigade
Sandra de la Loza
Robin Holder
Betty Yu
Radical Housing Manifestos:
   Thomas Angotti
   Alicia Grullon
   Hate Free Zone
   Lynn Lewis, The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project
   Antoinette Martinez, Protect Sunset Park
   Robert Robinson
   Pati Rodriguez, Mi Casa No Es Su Casa
   Samuel Stein
   Sunset Park Popular Assembly

Working class communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color across U.S. cities have been disproportionately impacted by hyper-gentrification and displacement over the last fifteen years.

Is it possible to disrupt dominant narratives that depict gentrification as “inevitable” and a “natural” part of urban evolution—monolithic assertions that often come from real estate speculators, developers, extractive industries and the 1%? Can we harness our collective resources and trace a new trajectory that allows communities to flourish without being priced out of our neighborhoods?

Imagining De-gentrified Futures is an interactive exhibition attempting to imagine socially-just futures for our cities and aiming to rethink the assumed trajectory of urban development. Drawing inspiration from anti-gentrification resistance across the U.S., decolonization movements, and Afrofuturism, this exhibition gives permission to imagine, to dream, to unleash and explore ways in which socially-just futures can exist for city communities.

Works on view take a variety of approaches to examine and suggest strategies for the challenges in cities like Hollywood, Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York City’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.

Imagining De-Gentrified Futures is an apexart Invited Curator Exhibition. For more information please visit apexart.org/yu.php or contact elizabeth.larison@apexart.org.

ite a catchy description to grab your audience's attention...

THE HOME: RENTALS, EXPERIENCES, PLACES
Black Quantum Futurism*,Martine Derain*,Lukas Duwenhögger,Jana Euler,Ken Okiishi*,Cameron Rowland,Reena Spaulings,Arseny Zhilyaev*,Samia Henni*
28.08 - 29.11.2020 / Musée Grobet-Labadié
In an age of mass migration caused by climate change, war, totalitarian regimes, genocide and gentrification, housing has become one of the major global challenges. For too many, it has become increasingly difficult to find a safe place to live, and virtually impossible to own a home. Yet having a home, or just a safe place, is the precondition for rehearsing new forms of communality, equality, care and indeed love.   

In Marseille, the consequences of the global housing crisis are clear and present. Nonetheless, over the last decades numerous local associations have been working toward better living conditions and increased rights for inhabitants and migrants. Thus, the idea of home is constantly being renegotiated at the crossroads between displacement and belonging.

Musée Grobet-Labadié is one of many historic bourgeois homes that were transformed into a museum in the hope of giving us a clearer idea of “our” social history. It is a powerful political time machine that immerses you in a life lived at different times, in a home different to your own. But could this time machine also help us see a different past and envision a more communal future? Can it be repurposed to generate a more collaborative plan?   

Participants: Black Quantum Futurism* (Collective, US), Martine Derain* (1960, FR), Lukas Duwenhögger (1956, DE), Jana Euler (1982, DE), Ken  Okiishi* (1968, US), Cameron Rowland (1988, US), Reena Spaulings (Collective, US), Arseny Zhilyaev*(1984, RU), Samia Henni* (1980, DZ), Noailles Debout (Collective, FR). 

The threads of this plot are woven throughout the city:  Cité Radieuse, Unite d’Habitation by Le Corbusier, Bel Horizon residential condominium and the Hôtel-Dieu Intercontinental.

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As a part of Black Quantum Futurism's Black Womxn Temporal Portal project, Black Womxn Time Camp is two-day long program exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts from the frameworks, rituals, and cultural traditions of self-identifying Black women, femmes, girls, non-binary, and gender nonconforming folx.

The program includes a tea ceremony and over 20 workshops, talks,  performances, presentations and portals from local, national, and international artists and creators,  including:  Morena Espiritual, Hannah I. Place, AnAkA, Karine Fleurima, Almah LaVon Rice, Soliana Habte, Ade Oni, Black Quantum FUturism, Imani Harmon, Xenobia Bailey, Ingrid Raphael, Chanelle Adams, Janine Francois, Tonika Berkley, Jasmine Newton, Joy KMT, Camae Ayewa, DSM 215 Collective, Womanist Working Collective,  Christina Springer, Jasmine Hearn + Angie Pittman, and Antônia Gabriela Araújo.

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DATES:

September 20 - 10am-4:30pm

September 27 -10am-5pm

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ALL WORKSHOPS ARE ONLINE  

Links will be sent to registrants via email

FULL SCHEDULE BELOW

ALL AGES

SUGGESTED DONATION:

$10 per day, $18 for both dates

Sliding scale/free for low-resourced individuals + youth - choose the donation option on eventbrite

 $40  for physical Black Womxn Temporal Toolkit (includes admission)

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Admission includes digital zine download

and access to all online materials. Black Womxn Temporal Toolkit

is an additional $40 and includes physical zine and other items.

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Safe(r) Time Statement: Black Womxn Time Camp is a spacetime that privileges the experiences and temporalities of Black women, girls, transwomen (transwomen are women but we name to affirm them so that they know this space belongs to them), nonbinary, gender nonconforming folx. Indigenous and POC folx welcome with respectful engagement and appropriate making space/stepping back. People will be swiftly booted and banned for any intentional disrespect, misogynoir, anti-Blackness, transphobia, ableism, or ageism towards Black, queer, trans, or youth folx. If you have any questions about what that means and whether you should attend, please let us know.

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Accessibility Statement: While we currently do not have the resources to include closed captioning, sign language, or language translation during Time Camp, we are committed to making the space as accessible as possible, including making available a digital and physical Black Womxn Temporal toolkit with a zine, program, and booklet. If presenters are willing to share their presentations, we will also make those available upon request beforehand. Some sessions will be recorded with permission of the presenter and may be made available upon request after Time Camp. Please feel free to e-mail us at blackquantumfuturism@gmail.com with other suggestions or questions.

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About Time Camp

Time Camp is an ongoing event series. Time Camp 001 was held Oct. 2017 in collaboration

with Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; TIME CAMP 002/CLT was held Oct 2018 in collaboration with Janelle Dunlap and Goodyear Arts in Charlotte; TIME CAMP 003 was held March 2019 in collaboration with Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia. Black Womxn Temporal Portal Project support provided by Added Velocity which is administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler  School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation.

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In their installation forms, Black Womxn Temporal Portal — The Future(s) Are Black Quantum Womanist Black Quantum Futurism and X-Cosmos-X by Olivia McGilchrist each permit a mode of reading-in-the-gaps; through the Web portal and VR experience. The approach suits these works, which propose speculative space-time and kaleidoscopic visions capable of translating the complexity and fluidity of identity.Eager to contribute to the accessibility and visibility of these works despite the current world health crisis, Studio XX offers here a collection of photo and video fragments from the intended physical installation. An essay by Marilou Craft accompanies the online exhibition.

Time in Justice x Housing Futures (WORKSHOP FULL)

WORKSHOP FulL A workshop exploring the relationship between justice, linear time constructs, and notions of the future in marginalized Black communities. The presenter Rasheedah Phillips will provide examples from Black Quantum Futurism’s communal quantum time capsule archive and other projects exploring housing, temporality, gentrification, and Black histories and futurities, as well as from her own work providing legal representation to families facing housing instability, and working on housing policy issues with a racial justice and afrofuturist lens. Through an online group exercise, participants will apply afrofuturist visioning tools to imagining housing futures, considering the opportunities for disrupting temporal and spatial displacement for vulnerable people in their own communities. 

Black Quantum Futurism, Masha Godovannaya, Yevgeniy Fiks, Andréa Stanislav, Axel Straschnoy, Driant Zeneli

Curator: Maria Veits
Israeli Center for Digital Art, 4 Ha'Amoraim Street, Holon, Israel
February 22 - May 23, 2020

Opening reception: February 22, 20.00

Exhibition working hours: Tuesdays 4 - 8 pm, Wednesdays and Thursdays 2 - 6 pm, Saturdays 11 am - 3 pm

Admission is free

Off to Space: Countenarrating the Cosmos is a group exhibition bringing together works by 6 international artists and collectives dealing with contested narratives, public history and turbulent contemporary political contexts by analyzing and revisiting space exploration strategies that started in the 20th century as attempts to widen geopolitical influence, accumulate power and make utopian  futures possible.

Today’s environmental, political and economic crisis alongside global colonial ambitions that stretch to other planets instigate a new spiral turn of the space race, which is joined by new large players on the political arena. In this context revisiting the space programs of the Cold War era and the politics behind them allows for deeper understanding of the past, amplifying its untold stories and voices and thinking of alternative futures. Aimed to expand the possibilities and powers of humanity the space programs have been and remain a form of political and ideological battles both between and within societies producing them since they are closely connected to the issues of power, race, ethnicity, identity, and gender struggles, territory division and inequality.

Addressing various forms of cosmisms and counterfuturisms, the presented works  - videos, prints, collages and installations  - balance between facts and fiction, sci-fi and mockumentary and often juxtaposу an individual story to collective history. Using events or phenomena set in the past, the exhibited works, however, have a definite connection with the contemporary moment and global political processes including migration and refugee crisis, growing antisemitism and new strategies of exile, feminist movement, postcolonial discourse of reclaiming the past and the future.  By creating counterhistories they deal with the issues of displaced identities and articulate cases of voice dispossession thus bringing historical justice to silenced communities and individuals. Presenting space exploration from positions of ethnic minorities, women, animals, small communities, dependent economies and displaying how affected space representations have always been by current dominant ideologies and political visions, the exhibition becomes a platform for discovering a variety of counterfuturisms and temporalities and offers artistic ways of reclaiming displaced stories and representations of the past and future.

HASH Award Ceremony Program
Fri, February 21, 2020, 3–10pm
ZKM | Media Theater, free admission

With Tegan Bristow, Johanna Bruckner, Daphne Dragona, Jonas Lund, Mary Maggic, Nicolas Maigret, Rasheedah Phillips, Dani Ploeger, Léa Porré, Tiare Ribeaux, Marloes de Valk, and others

3pm
Talks and short presentations on the call topics:
Ghosted, Refiguring the Feminist Future, and Planetary Glitch

4:15pm
Performance on the project The Future(s) Are Black Quantum Womanist
by Rasheedah Phillips

4:45pm
Talks and short presentations on the open call topics:
Rigged Systems, Engineering Care, and Violent Consumer Media

6pm
Performance on the project Molecular Sex & Synthetic Love
by Johanna Bruckner

7pm
HASH Award Ceremony

8:30pm
Get-together

 
The Web Residencies program is supported by the Ministry for Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The prize money for the HASH is donated by the Foundation of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg.

The Past longing for the Present that will be the Future! The voices of our future ancestors alive in Moor Mother and Black Quantum Futurist who are interdisciplinary creatives, unraveling the Past-Present-Future-Time which is always NOW!

Camae Ayewa A.K.A. Moor Mother and Rasheedah Phillips A.K.A. Black Quantum Futurist will weave quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound that present innovative thoughts and music; a vehicle for current matters and tools for practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix.  

Nona Hendryx A.K.A. ‘Cyboracle’ will host a conversation with Black Quantum Futurist, Moor Mother and perform with Mi.mu Gloves and other wearable music controllers.

Prizm opens Miami Art Week with an experiential evening featuring culinary delights from our hospitality partner Copper Door, and keynote “Loving the Arts: Building Audiences, Established and New, in our Contemporary Landscape”, with arts marketing and communications impresario and founder of ESP Inc, Tiana Webb Evans in conversation with Bahia Ramos, Director of Arts at the Wallace Foundation, and artfully completed with Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips, Esq.) presented by Philadelphia Contemporary

Black Quantum Futurism will present an installation of Community Futures Lab at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/current/contributors/black_quantum_futurism

An exhibition as a series of trainings for a future of being together otherwise, convened with a multitude of collaborators by Jeanne van Heeswijk and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht  . Featuring ALl Time is Local Installation by Black Quantum Futurism and upcoming trainings Nov. 21-23.

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Trainings for the Not-Yet takes place at BAK until 12 January 2020. The weekly trainings have now officially kicked off: gatherings during which visitors, artists, (inter)national guests, Utrechters, and local initiatives collectively think through and enact (alternatives for) the future. Many trainings culminate in weekly public programs, usually at the weekend. In this newsletter we highlight some of these upcoming trainings and public programs.

BQF at Valongo Festival

Formed in Philadelphia, United States, the black quantum futurism is a platform for interdisciplinary practice created by camae ayewa and Rasheedah Philips. Building on books, performances, experimental music projects, facilities, movies and educational programs, the project is defined as an initiative, of a theoretical and practical character, which aims to experience reality through the manipulation of space-time, End of designing possible future. The action is based on a framework that includes principles and qualities of quantum physics, speculative and visionary methodologies, as well as dimensions on consciousness, time and space of the cultural traditions of thought black. From the multitude of possible future and the understanding of a non-linear time, the practice of bqf as an exercise of political imagination allows us to see the future and, above all, provides tools to change it, change it or improve it .
After going through important contemporary art spaces, such as moma, serpentine gallery and some biennial, at his seminar at #valongo19, will present us the principles and methods of the bqf, so that it helps us manipulate time and See the future

Considering the unique, intersectional temporal experiences of Black women, femmes, non-binary folks, and girls and the ways in which we are being actively erased from the objective, linear future, the Black Womxn Temporal Portal is a sculptural portal/booth that serves as a temporary temporal sanctuary for self-identified Black women, femmes, nonbinary folks, and girls. The portal activates the plural, subjective, and quantum nature of the future(s) where Black women, femmes, girls, and nonbinary folks exist and are safe, loved, and valued. The portal contains an open access, interactive nonlinear timescape/tapestry/temporal map/toolkit of Black womanist temporal rituals and tech preparing us for Black quantum womanist future(s). The portal also exists as a web-based platform at www.blackwomxntemporal.net

Two events related to the portal's unveiling will take place:

Activation, Pt. 00: Black Womxn Temporal Portal
FIRST FRIDAY RECEPTION, NOVEMBER 1, 2019, 5-7pm at the Painted Bride Art Center

Activation, Pt. 01: Daylight Saving Time Epilogue
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 3, 2019, 3-6pm at the Painted Bride Art Center - Invite Only Event (invites will be sent via email)

Sep 13 – Nov 2, 2019 / Opening Sep 12 @ 7:00pm

Artist Talk/Workshop Sept 14 3-5pm
Performance Sept 14 8pm
Both events are free

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Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a multidisciplinary collaboration between artists Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. Through their videos, publications, collages, sculptures, performances, and discursive events, BQF engage in community-based projects that draw from quantum physics and Black/Afrodiasporic cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. For this exhibition, BQF will present a body of their recent work that questions how we can manipulate and collapse space-time in order to imagine, see, and make manifest future realities in the present.

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Their exhibition will be complemented by a workshop/artist talk that further engages with BQF’s interest in DIY time travel. For their talk, they’ll be joined by Adam Rudder from the Hogan’s Alley Society, who will act as a respondent and speak to the work they do with Vancouver’s Black community. Following that afternoon talk, Black Quantum Futurism will make a performance at 8pm on Saturday September 14.

This second night of programming for 'Towards a Black Testimony' features artist talks and a performance by Black Quantum Futurism.
For the Saturday events go to: Towards a Black Testimony and 𝙖𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙮 Towards a Black Testimony.

In 'Towards a Black Testimony', the London-based artistic and curatorial duo Languid Hands (comprised of Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot) brings together artists, thinkers, writers, listeners and speakers, wanderers and wonderers, to explore the complexity of Black Testimony. In the exhibition space of Stroom Den Haag, Languid Hands will present their new moving image work 'Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer, Protest, Peace' (commissioned by Jerwood Arts, London, UK). The work will be on view at Stroom from 26 October until 20 December 2019.

Drawing on archival imagery, Black geographies, and the dying declarations of Black Martyrs, the 40-minute film examines Black Testimony as obscured, ignored and undermined. This work borrows its subtitle - Prayer, Protest, Peace - from the third track on jazz drummer and composer Max Roach's 1960 album We Insist! which features jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Using this composition as the underlying structure for the film itself, Languid Hands presents three chapters or mediations on death and dying and consider the im/possibility of Black Testimony. The script draws from a variety of well and lesser known Black texts, weaving the audience through a performative lecture written and delivered by Imani Robinson and carefully annotated by Rabz Lansiquot's archival exploration.

Schedule for Sunday 27 October 2019

17:00-17:45 hrs
Artist round table featuring Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips, Rebecca Bellantoni, Shenece Oretha, Rabz Lansiquot, and Imani Robinson.

17:45-18:30 hrs
Break

18:30-19:30 hrs
Black Quantum Futurism performance (title TBC)
Black Quantum Futurism is a collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) & Rasheedah Phillips. They will present an immersive performance in response to the themes of Towards a Black Testimony of which sound is a central element. Their performances include voice, the live composition of electronic music and noise, film and three dimensional setting. BQF is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space.
https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com

Dir. Chet Catherine Pancake, USA, 2019, 114 mins

Effortlessly multigenerational, interdisciplinary, and diverse in scope, QUEER GENIUS peers into the lives of five virtuosos who have challenged artistic formalism, gender roles, and heterosexism without apology in both their private lives and creative practices. Composed of rare and in-depth portraits of late experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, the art collective Black Quantum Futurism, East Village poet Eileen Myles, and performance artist Jibz Cameron, this documentary charts the robust family tree of the lesbian and queer avant-garde across six decades. It’s a lineage that shows no sign of growing dormant.

September 20 - October 27, 2019

Philly-based artist/curators, Ricky Yanas and Kristen Neville Taylor are pleased to present ​The Green Sun​, a group exhibition featuring works by Grimaldi Baez, Black Quantum Futurism, Jeff Blocksidge, Alta Buden, Micah Danges, Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller, Juan Hurtado Salazar, Aurash Khawarzad, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Jen Nugent, Kaitlin Pomerantz, Provisional Island, Em Rea, M Slater, and Li Sumpter. This exhibition will follow up on conversations introduced during The Green Sun: A Micro Symposium (organized by Yanas and Neville Taylor, held at Icebox Project Space on August 25th) centering on solar power’s history and potential for the future.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/reception-for-the-green-sun-tickets-71994695071

Black Grandmother Paradoxes + Quantum Womanist Futures

An interactive lecture exploring the history of linear time constructs, time travel, and notions of the future. In this presentation, Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism will contrast dominant Western linear time constructs with Afrodiasporan traditions of space, time, and Black futurist time travel.

https://blackfuturism2019.xyz/

Panelists | Akinbode Akinbiyi (Black Studio in South Africa), Inam Kula (#RhodesMustFall), Malose Malahlela (Kelaketla! Library), and Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism). Moderated by Sepake Angiama (Chicago Architectural Biennial)

Curator Sepake Angiama convenes a discussion with contributors of the third edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, ...and other such stories. The talk, entitled Black Utopias?, addresses making space specifically black space outside the context of Chicago, and more broadly within the US and the African diaspora. Bringing questions of heritage, preservation, and history as well as what is brought into the future, the discussion will address how a black space be produced within the real or the imaginary. How do artists and designers build these spaces collectively? How is space produced through sound and how does the sonic as well as the visual take us to other dimensions?

Photo Courtesy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Chicago, North Lawndale, 2019.

Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artists Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) present a new installation and accompanying live programme of music, performance, spoken word, talks and workshops.

Black Quantum Futurism’s practice is centred on a radical artistic methodology inspired by Afrofuturism, Afrodiasporan traditions of consciousness, and quantum physics. Through activism, artistic research, music, film and community-based writing projects, BQF offer practical techniques to empower marginalised communities, assisting individuals to overcome social injustices and oppressive linear time constructs. Through focusing on the recovery and preservation of communal memories, histories and stories, BQF aim to transform negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and holistic methods of healing.

Taking place over two weeks in the ICA’s Lower Gallery, Temporal Deprogramming features recent BQF works, including zines, video works, a listening station and a large-scale Black Quantum Futurism ‘event map’, which visualises BQF’s ‘intersectional time orientation’.

Contributions from invited artists will form the live programme, which features work by artists Barby Asante, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, and The Otolith Group, musicians Nkisi and Elaine Mitchener, and feminist activists East End Sisters Uncut.

Quantum Womanist Futures, Black Space Agency + Communal Temporalities is a lecture given by Rasheedah Phillips, founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, and founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Sci-fi Collective. Phillips is also the co-creator of the award-winning Community Futures Lab project, a socially engaged art and research project that explores communal temporality, futurism, and preservation of memory and history in an area undergoing redevelopment, gentrification, and mass displacement.

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Manifest Destiny, curated by Ingrid LaFleur, examines the practical implementation of the cultural movement Afrofuturism to alter destinies within Detroit and beyond. Inspired by the 400 year anniversary of West African captives brought to the Jamestowne settlement in Virginia, Manifest Destiny honors the legacy of Black-bodied people to forge their own destiny regardless of circumstance.

4-5pm: Performance
Project: Time Capsule by Black Quantum Futurism
Beneath several affordable housing projects and housing estates across America and Europe, several mysterious time capsules have been unearthed. These time capsules appear to be quantum in nature, displaying the features of retrocausality and entanglement, opening up the capsule contents to influences from the present, the future(s) and the past(s). Project: Time Capsule is an interactive, performative lecture that explores the contents of the time capsules, as well as the topics of gentrification, temporal-spatial oppression, and Black communal hacking of temporal norms with readings, video, and live sound experimentation.
Project: Time Capsule is inspired by true events – a mysterious safe with time capsule-like contents was found beneath the grounds of a public housing complex in Macon, Georgia in 2017, while others have been discovered under several other affordable housing projects in recent years. In Project: Time CapsuleBlack Quantum Futurism (BQF) speculates on the discovery of these time capsules as activation events that occur in several different housing projects in America and Europe simultaneously. The unearthing of the time capsules, both real and mythological, touches upon many facets of BQF’s praxis, including their use of “quantum time capsules” and several projects exploring communal temporalities, sites of memory, and access to affordable housing.
Artist bio can be found here.
(Atrium, 1st Floor)

World Premiere - June 20-22, 2019

Poet and noise musician Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) presents her first theatrical work, a futuristic exploration—part musical, part choreopoem, part play—of public/private ownership, housing, and technology set in a living room in a corporate-owned apartment complex. Framed by Ayewa’s bold poetry and bolstered by new Moor Mother music performed live by Irreversible Entanglements and the Circuit City Band, Circuit City is an afrofuturist song cycle for our current climate.

Philadelphia: May 3 - June 15, 2019
Phoebe Grip, Pepon Osorio, Joyce Owens, Habib Kheradyar Zamani

New York: May 10 - June 16, 2019
Carol Bruns,Leroy Johnson, Coco Picard, Christian Tedeschi

Chicago: May 11 - June 23, 2019
Black Quantum Futurism, Judith Brotman, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Nina Sarnelle

Los Angeles: May 25 - June 16, 2019
Anne Bray, Gregory Coates, Ruyell Ho, Ivanko Talevski

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Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce Orbits, a four-part concurrent exhibition spanning all four locations to celebrate our first 10 years as an artist-run organization.

Each exhibition of Orbits draws together the works of four artists from our respective cities to examine their interconnected legacies and the conversations that unfold in placing their work in dialogue with one another. The multigenerational artists included in Orbits were nominated by current TSA members to highlight the work of those that have contributed to their arts communities not only through their own works but also through their support of other artists.

All Time is Local: Black Quantum Futurism

Exhibition On View: April 22-May 31, 2019

Reception: May 16, 2019

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“TIME [...] WAS HISTORICALLY A LOCAL PRACTICE ROOTED IN DAILY RITUALS AND BOUND UP IN THE PARTICULARITIES OF UNIQUE PHYSICAL SPACES.” - ADAM BARROWS

Much like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, object, and video installation continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philly. Including select pieces from their Dismantling the Master’s Clock, Temporal Disruptors, and Black Space Agency series, the works meditate on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philly, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. 

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/577177352802432/

Moor Mother’s new work Red Summer, which will occur on the 100th anniversary of Red Summer – the flood of heightened anti-Black racial terror that swept cities across America in 1919 – features a large-scale performance curated by Moor Mother and an installation by Black Quantum Futurism. Both entangle the temporal present with these historical events, enacting a retro-current wave that reaches back to connect these layers in the fabric of space-time.

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Red Summer: A digital zine by Rasheedah Phillips and Moor Mother of Black Quantum Futurism @AfroFuturAffair https://win.gs/2vuTBmt 

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THEORY & TALK

Inspired by Rammellzee’s Time Stoppers temporal displacement devices and the contributions of Black women scientists and inventors, this is a ritual causality performative lecture when memories will be re-encoded with new temporal information embodying the features of Black womxn and Black quantum futurist time(s).

Opening January 25, 2019, 7–9pm
Conversation between BQF  and Ineil Quaran at 7:30pm

On view through April 20, 2019, Tue–Sat, 12–5pm
Free and open to the public

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​How can one examine the unknown? How is this unknown shaped by its temporal realities? How does one resist, recover, when facing the erasure of memory?  This may involve a reinvestigation and uncovering of hidden histories, and a hacking into future histories where they have already been erased.  Utilizing collage, video, ​text, ​and sound installations, this exhibition by Philadelphia-based Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, and Rasheedah Phillips aka The Afrofuturist Affair) draws from quantum physics​ ​,speculative fiction, and Black/Afro​-​diasporan cultural traditions of observing time and space. The works aim to break free into the unknown futures of past selves, and to honor the ritual casualties and philosophies ​of Black ancestry, culture, and spirit. 

Join us at Squeaky Wheel on Friday, January 25th at 7pm for the opening reception of the exhibition and a conversation with Moor Mother at 7:30pm.

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Public Programs
February 9, 2–5pm: Black Magnolias x Black Quantum Futurism: Discussion and Creative Writing Workshop
April 5, 7pm: Worldline ⃝ Timeline: Screening of John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, and work by Dana McKnight and Amanda Strong

Time emerges from timeless degrees of freedom, creating conditions by which Afro-descendants can collapse all eras, instances, and possibilities for Blackness across time and into the present, borrowing freely from any temporal dimension. Through an examination of the Unknown, and Black/Afrodiasporan ritual temporalities, Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) will activate portals, shadows, and black holes as sites of re-memory, future memory, and temporal liberation.

The exhibition contains a preview of works-in-progress, including BQF’s Black Womxn Temporal Portal (The Future(s) Are Black Quantum Womanist), a project that begin as a protest statement against limited conceptions about what “The Future is…” that dis-includes Black womxn, femmes, and girls. Considering the unique, intersectional temporal experiences of Black womxn, femmes, and girls and the ways in which we are being actively erased from the objective, linear future, this text, sound, and image series is part of a nonlinear timescape/tapestry/temporal map/toolkit preparing us for the Black quantum womanist future(s). The exhibition will also include the second chapter of ShadowGrams, which first premiered at The Kitchen Gallery (NYC) in 2018. ShadowGrams questions what it means to “See into the Darkness Without Seeing the Dark.” The work features projection, poetry and sound that work in-tandem to illuminate a past unknown in order to create portals inward, towards self.

Programming will include a special performance by BQF and a Black Womxn’s Time Camp with workshops, film screenings, and brunch.

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A Science Fiction Community phenomenon featuring live music, a science fiction themed art show, a kids zine-workshop, RPG's hosted by Red Cap's Corner, sci-fi stories from Metropolarity, Amalgem comics, afrofuturism from Community Future's Lab, face-painting, vendors and more all amongst the beautiful insects & weird creatures featured at the Insectarium. Science Fiction is a great vehicle to explore all the possibilities of our human experience, this convention focuses on that potentiality through fun, music, art and games for all ages.

A proposal to design & imagine alternative tomorrows using the internet(s)

Our proposal to deal with the weird state of the world and imagine collectively alternative tomorrows, is a thought-experiment designed around / between / below / beyond an open question / invitation / provocation about everything, for everyone and everywhere:

How can we decelerate, decolonise, debrief the coevolution of the internet(s), digital technologies and societies?

With this question, we aim to look at the interrelations between the internet(s), digital technologies and societies. In other words, the interrelations between the networks, the tools and the collective narratives. Questioning the existing ones to imagine the alternatives, beyond physical and mental borders, in a collaborative effort across disciplines, sectors, ages and cultures.

Afrofuturism: Reimagining space and time through speculative fiction

SPACE IS THE PLACE
JOHN CONEY | USA | 1974 | 101 MIN
Thursday, March 21 | 7:00 PM | Phila. Film Center
Reserve Free Tickets Here: http://filmadelphia.org/events/space-is-the-place/

Author and founder of the Afrofuturist Affair, Rasheedah Phillips discusses the foundations and future of #Afrofuturism, a philosophy that challenges traditional notions of space, time, and technology to see alternative pasts and futures for the African Diaspora.

A companion to his legendary album of the same name, SPACE IS THE PLACE features jazz iconoclast #SunRa as an intergalactic traveler intent on resettling a distant planet with African Americans. Traveling back to 1940s Chicago and to 1970s Oakland, Sun Ra faces off against the nefarious Overseer and a team of evil NASA scientists. Mind-bending, visually dazzling, and infused with electrifying music, SPACE IS THE PLACE is a landmark early work of Afrofuturist cinema, combining sharp social critique with visionary metaphysical theories. The feature will be preceded by the short RECURRENCE PLOT: THE FAMILY CIRCLE (2018), adapted from a short story by Rasheedah Phillips. In it, a memory-storing bracelet transports a young woman backward in time to the day of her own mother’s death, challenging the notion that time travels in only one direction.

As part of the Timeless Degrees of Freedom exhibition, Black Womxn Time Camp is a day-long program exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts from the frameworks, rituals, and cultural traditions of self-identifying Black womxn, femmes, girls, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks. The program includes a zine brunch, workshops with Black Quantum Futurism, Womanist Working Collective, Shivon Pearl Love, Ras Cutlass (Metropolarity), film screenings, sonic meditations with Marcelline Mandeng and Moor Mother, and tarot readings with Oshun's Mirror.

Dive more deeply into ideas about the past, the future, and the relationship between them in Sing, Unburied, Sing. Through the lens of Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that combines elements of science fiction to re-examine historical events, use everyday creative writing tools such as memory, imagination, and music to explore how one can time travel. This workshop is led by Rasheedah Phillips, an author and the creator of the AfroFuturist Affair. Click to RSVP for this free event. 

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10:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Towards World-Building: Sciences at the End of the World

Exploring the settler ontologies that govern technoscientific inquiry, this panel will engage technology towards a liberatory, world-building politic.

shawné michaelain holloway, Artist

Rasheedah Phillips, Artist and Co-Creator of Black Quantum Futurism

Alexander G. Weheliye, Professor, Northwestern University

Moderated by Maandeeq Mohamed, Writer

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The Refiguring the Future conference convenes artists, educators, writers, and cultural strategists to envision a shared liberatory future by providing us with collective imaginings that move beyond and critique oppressive systems to offer alternative possibilities. Additional participants include:  Morehshin Allahyari and Shirin Fahimi, Ruha Benjamin, micha cárdenas, Taeyoon Choi, Sofía Córdova, Hayley Cranberry, Jaskiran Dhillon, Kadija Ferryman, Shannon Finnegan, Aljumaine Gayle and Ladan Siad, Anneli Goeller, Kathy High, shawné michaelain holloway, In Her Interior (Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini), Yo-Yo Lin, Cynthia Malone, Maandeeq Mohamed, Rasheedah Phillips, Legacy Russell, Tiare Ribeaux, Sofía Unanue, Alexander Weheliye, and Pinar Yoldas.

The Refiguring the Future conference is curated by Eyebeam/REFRESH Curatorial and Engagement Fellow Lola Martinez and REFRESH member Maandeeq Mohamed.

The end of the world may not be as distant as it once seemed. Some have gone so far as to claim that the apocalypse has already happened—we just haven’t noticed it yet. These apocalyptic anxieties are nothing new, yet they have assumed a newfound urgency in recent years. For scholars, critics, artists, and practitioners working across the arts and humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences— including literary and critical theory, theology, cultural and environmental history, climate science, geology, biology, and cosmology, among others—the future is, astoundingly, now. This renewed interest in the end time raises several questions: Just how much future is there? When and where does the future end? And how does that measurement shape our actions in the present? How do speculative temporalities form or constrain current ethical practices? What does it mean to be a good citizen of the future? What obligations do we bear to communities situated on the horizon of time? What are the normative claims of futurity? To approach these questions and conundrums, we propose a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar to gather some of the world’s most dynamic theorists, artists, writers, and scholars currently grappling with the ever more imminent end-to-things.

At what sites have Women of Color (WoC) resisted their oppression, built community, or created new spaces for their work? What is the significance of marking those sites? How can art and the preservation of history help transform negative cycles into positive ones for WoC? How can archivists assist in making WoC’s resistance work more visible throughout history, now, and into the future(s)? Black Quantum Futurism, Community Futures Lab co-founder Rasheedah Phillips and #SisterlyHistory collaborators Yolanda Wisher and Karina Puente discuss this and more at the next #ChroniclingResistance listening session.

The Price Lab for Digital Humanities and Penn Program in Environmental Humanities are excited to announce a day long symposium on November 30 on Community Mapping and Civic Data.

The event has been designed to stimulate thought and conversation about how humanists might approach data and mapping not as simply analytical representations of reality but as subjects that emerge from relationships of power and, simultaneously, as tools for imagination and storytelling.

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​UCHRI is launching a multi-year program conceptualizing civil war as a paradigm for the political. For the inaugural event, “Out There: 5 talkbits on war-futures in outer spaces,” we will host an intimate dialogue centered around questions of territoriality, violence, and belonging as they relate to discourses of outer space.

Reception to follow.

Each talkbit will address the central provocation: Outer space as uncharted territory.

Primary Interlocutors

Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips

Black Quantum Futurism

Ainehi Edoro

Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Keith Spencer

Author, Editor at Salon.com

Jamie Thomas

Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College

Convened by the Social Art Network.

Over two-days artists from around the country will come together to share practice, showcase work and explore what it means to be making art through social engagement right now.

Artists, activists, community groups, curators, students, academics, funders and sectors working in the social realm are invited to join the conversation through a series of events at Site Gallery and other venues around the city.

Through building a network, showcasing practice and expanding dialogue, the Summit will develop agency in the field of art and social practice and test the ground for launching a Social Art Biennale in 2020.

Ten years of severe austerity measures together with the wider divisive political climate has triggered a sense of urgency for conversations around the impact on communities. We are interested in questioning, what kind of society do we want to live in and what roles can artists play?

The programme includes a series of artist-led labs; presentations by international guests; workshops; discussions; a publication launch; free lunch each day; a party on the Thursday night; plenty of opportunities to network and share practice, and a whole host of diverse work presented by artists and practitioners.

Artists leading labs include Harold Offeh, Anna Francis, Sophie Hope, Elsa James, a place of their own, Sophie Hope, Rebecca Beinart, Sally Labern [Drawing Shed] and Studio Polpo.

International guests include Black Quantum Futurism & Interference Archive.

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Time Camp 002 will be a two-day program and interactive installation exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts from various frameworks, disciplines, and cultural traditions. The program includes two days of workshops, presentations, film screenings, interactive installations and performances from local and national artists, scientists, social activists, filmmakers, writers, poets and more.

Time Camp 001 was first hosted in Philadelphia, PA in October of 2017. Time Camp 002 is a collaborative effort of BQF and Janelle Dunlap to “dismantle the master clock” and spread the philosophy of afrofuturists traditions, literature and arts.

Blackness has always been light years ahead. Join filmmakers and visual artists who resist and subvert the traditional parameters of science fiction, in a conversation on contemporary black reality, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism.  

Invoking Rammellzee’s Time Stoppers temporal displacement device, this is a ritual causality performance when memories will be re-encoded with new temporal information, and where Black Quantum Futurism will explore the equations of time that emerge from timeless degrees of freedom by entangling moving images with live sound experimentation and spoken text spellcasting.

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NO GUTS, NO GALAXY is a weekly series of artist-curated slideshows that expand upon the diverse subjects addressed in RAMMΣLLZΣΣ: Racing for Thunder, such as, the Downtown scene, early hip-hop and performance, Afrofuturism and cosmology, the mythology of Gothic Futurism, and the coercive power of language.

Like Afrofuturism, which has imagined temporal nodes that escape the modern visions of time, Black Quantum Futurism is working on the fusion between the quantum times of physics and the African traditions of spatio-temporal consciousness.

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Rasheedah Phillips [US] (science fiction lawyer) and Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother [US] (musician poet and artist) are the founders of Black Quantum Futurism and the Community Future Lab in Philadelphia, a space dedicated to emancipation of communities through art and music

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Inspired by the legacy of the Fair Housing Act, Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, and the space race in North Philadelphia during the 1960s, this art exhibition and community programming explores issues of affordable and fair housing, displacement/space/land grabs, and gentrification through the lens of afrofuturism, oral histories/futures, and Black spatial-temporal autonomy.

In North Philly during the 1960’s, Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, a civil rights leader and minister at Philadelphia’s Zion Baptist Church, established Progress Aerospace Enterprises (PAE), one of the first Black-owned aerospace companies. An innovator of its day, PAE had strong connections to the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements, affordable housing, economic stability, passage of the Fair Housing Act, and the space race. Sullivan, along with church members from Zion Baptist, also founded the Zion Gardens affordable housing project and Progress Plaza, Opportunities Industrialization Center, Inc., and other innovative organizations and programs around the country and world. The Civil Rights movement and space race would collide, with a lot of popular resistance to the Moon landing and the space race from the Black community, such as the Poor People’s March at Cape Kennedy, which condemned the government for pouring billions into the moon landing while ignoring the growing issues of poverty and lack of affordable housing. The Black community also spoke out against the lack of diversity in NASA astronauts and the controversial resignation of a Black astronaut a few years before the moon landing. In response to some of these critiques, NASA became briefly involved in the design and applicability of spaceship materials in “urban” and government-subsidized housing. Much of this resistance and involvement has been erased from the popular memory.

Black Quantum Futurism aims to restimulate memory of all of these interconnected events and underexplored history, make the threads visible and show how they reach into and overlay the present and future(s) of affordable housing, Black liberation, and the fight for space and time in our communities. The project specifically locates these inquiries within the context of uncovering time and memory in North Philly, unburying quantum, Afro-diasporic histories, and envisioning what tools are needed to create liberatory Afrofuture(s). The project considers the ways in which memory and time are interconnected to housing and location, as well as both universal and mundane concepts of space and race.

Curated by Black Quantum Futurism, art exhibition and programming collaborators include: Youth HEALers Stand Up!, Denise Valentine, Betty Leacraft, Faye Anderson, Sammus, and Metropolarity. Artwork will be on display at Icebox Project Space from April 11-April 25, 2018. Programming will take place on various dates (separate invites will be linked below).

Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly is an ongoing collaborative art + creative research project exploring the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement within North Philly. The first iteration of the project included the award winning afrofuturist community space, Community Futures Lab. https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com/community-futurisms

April 14 - Black Space Agency Opening Reception w/ Black Quantum Futurism performance at Icebox Project Space

April 15, 2018 - Black Space Time Matters Movie Day + Discussion + Mapping (Screening Afronauts + Space Traders + + TBA) at Icebox Project Space

April 18, 2018 - Housing Futures: Landlord-Tenant Rights workshop (to be held at Brewerytown-Sharswood Neighborhood Advisory Council at 30th and Master Street)

April 21, 2018 - Event TBA

April 22, 2018 (12:30-3:30pm) - Youth Housing Visioning Session at Icebox Project Space https://www.facebook.com/events/436911333429302/

Winner of The Kitchen’s inaugural Emerging Artist Award, Camae Ayewa/Moor Motherpresents an exhibition and performances showcasing the creative process of her second solo album,Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, and its instrumental accompaniment, Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines, using soundscape installation, film, collage, and poetry. Investigating the idea that every shadow has a history, the artist speaks about ancestral temporality and the embodiment of what remains and lingers: what takes shape and holds in the shadows of the physical world. Organized by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan.

Exhibition: February 21–March 17
Opening February 21, 6–8pm

Performances: March 6–7, 8pm

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Enjoy an intimate walk-through of the Philadelphia Assembled exhibition followed by a public discussion with PHLA collaborators and A Blade of Grass fellows - Black Quantum Futurism and the Reentry Think Tank. The walk-through will feature specific installations on view in the galleries and the discussion will focus on the place of collaboration, community work, and collective imagination in the arts as it relates to the ongoing efforts of these artists in Philadelphia and beyond. This program has been organized in collaboration with A Blade of Grass.

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an assembling of writers, artists, designers and activists exploring ethnofuturisms (afro, chicanix, indigenous) and the ultra unreal.

A 6-day festival, inside & outside the Onassis Cultural Centre Athens that maps Afrofuturism as a cultural and political movement through concerts, talks, workshops and film screenings.

As a term, Afrofuturism appeared in the 1990s to describe an Afro-American artistic trend which had found expression in sci-fi, fantasy literature, music, the visual arts, comics and movies. Read more: http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1955

Envisioned alongside Black Quantum Futurism Collective (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips), the Museum's Final Fridays program presents the seventh edition of the Black Quantum Futurism Afrofuturist Costume Ball, a celebration of Afrofuturist music, design, science fiction, and time-travel. Come dressed to impress in your best sci-fi and Afrofuturist costumes for a night of imagination, art and activism, with featured musical performances by Moor Mother and King Britt.

Rasheedah Phillips, Esq. will open this year’s DLF Forum with an exciting keynote talk entitled "Creating Communal Space-Times, Activating Quantum Time Capsules."  She'll discuss community-driven documentation, cultural memory and conceptions of time, and the potential of digital libraries to support and be shaped by marginalized people’s work to imagine alternate futures. Phillips will draw on her practical perspectives and experiences as a public interest attorney and activist, working against forces of gentrification and eminent domain in North Philadelphia — and on her conceptual ones, as an artist, science fiction writer, and co-founder of a community center designed around principles of Afrofuturism and Black Quantum Futurism.

Using Afrofuturism and science fiction as a lens and Octavia Butler's novel ‘Kindred’ as inspiration, this workshop by Rasheedah Phillips (USA) explores and experiments with how one can time travel with everyday tools such as memory, imagination, manipulation of language and perceptions.

Interdisciplinary social practice artist (and lawyer) Rasheedah Phillips considers how afrofuturism can be used by disenfranchised communities to create safer spaces for visioning and testing of ideas around community sustainability, resilience, and resistance, and as a technology for practical implementation of those ideas.

Rasheedah Phillips is an artist and a lawyer. In 2011 she created The AfroFuturist Affair, a grassroots community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture through creative events and creative writing. She currently serves as Managing Attorney of the LT Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and has worked at Community Law Services since 2008. In 2013 she was awarded a Next Generation of Women Leaders: Rising Stars by the Philadelphia city council.

Rasheedah Phillips will also be doing a performance that same day, location and time t.b.a.

In collaboration with Icebox Project Space Distance≠Time exhibition and performance, Black Quantum Futurism presents Time Camp 001, a two-day program and interactive installation exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts from various frameworks, disciplines, and cultural traditions. The program includes two days of workshops, presentations, rituals, film screenings, interactive installations and special performances from local and national artists, scientists, social activists, filmmakers, writers, poets and more at Icebox Project Space.

With the title NON-COMPLIANT FUTURES, Sight & Sound festival 2017 will deconstruct the grand narrative of innovation, which promises us a radiant future and one that relies on hyperconsumption, techno-positivism, digital colonialism, and the myth of exponential growth. 

The festival invites its audience to break free from a linear notion of progress and, rather, re-introduce concepts such as degrowth and sustainability to the core of our vision of what the future is. It is also an invitation to embrace the probable reality of an alien future, one that we will collectively endure with the whole of humanity and non-human life.

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Saturday 26 August at 8pm
Performance with Lizzi Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance, Angel Blood) & Stephen O´Malley (Sunn O))), KTL)
Reading by Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism)
Performance with Moor Mother

\Beneath several housing projects and housing estates across America and Europe, several mysterious time capsules have been unearthed. These time capsules appear to be quantum in nature, displaying the features of retrocausality and entanglement, opening up its contents to influences from both the future(s) and the past(s). Project: Time Capsule is a performative reading that explores the contents of the time capsules, using text, projections, and live sound experimentation with electronics. During the performance, BQF will weave science fiction realities with African diasporic concepts of time, ritual and sound, deconstruct linear temporalities and present temporal technologies that offer practical ways for escaping time loops, oppression vortices and the digital matrix. Temporal technologies are available for the oppressed Black and Brown people isolated in local, progressive linear fatalistic time ghettos that deny access to temporal dimensions outside of the narrow time band of the digitally-mediated present.  

In this performative lecture and workshop, Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism Collective will use Afrofuturism as a lens for exploring how one can time travel using everyday ​​tools such as memory, imagination, language, or crystals

Love and Time Travel Workshop - Love Now Media

More info coming soon

Maps are everywhere around us, ever present to help us navigate both public and personal geographies, or orient ourselves in communal and universal landscapes. But all maps come with an agenda - as much as maps can reveal about a place or idea, maps also have the power to hide or distort truths.  This workshop will explore the utility and practice of mapping, and ways in which maps have been used to disempower people and communities, and how they can be used as a liberatory and revelatory tools. We will experiment with creating quantum maps, sound maps, housing journey maps, and memory maps. 

In collaboration with Icebox Project Space , Time Camp 001 is a two-day program and interactive installation exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts, with activities include temporal sound design, time walks, temporal scavenger hunts, zinemaking, special performances, and more. Time Camp 001 will take place at the space-time point of September 30-Oct 1, 2017 at Icebox Project Space (Phila, PA). More details soon. 

We are inviting submissions for workshops and lectures, as well as art-based submissions for inclusion in the installation. 

Workshop and Lecture Submission Information
Seeking abstracts and proposals for 45 and 60 minute workshops and lectures for presentation at Time Camp. Please identify any audio/visual and electrical needs for your presentation. Also include presenter information and website if available. Please submit a proposal for your submission to afrofuturistaffair@gmail.com by June 20, 2017.

Sample topics include:
Time Travel Theories/Time Travel 101
Time Machine Design
Time Travel in Comics

Installation Submission information
Seeking submissions of small installations, film, audio/video, literature, photography, objects, and art pieces dealing with time travel, such as personal time machines and devices and time travel artifacts. Works can be individual or collaborative, and should be experimental. Proposals should include a description of your project or piece, including dimensions, sizes, number, and other specifications. Please identify any audio/visual and electrical needs. Also include artist information and website if available. Please submit a proposal for your submission to afrofuturistaffair@gmail.com by June 20, 2017. 

For more information please contact afrofuturistaffair@gmail.com

At Moogfest this year, interdisciplinary artist Moor Mother and Philadephia-based collectives The Afrofuturist Affair and Metropolarity will bring Black Quantum Futurism to life as a festival theme. Through an array of workshops and conversations, they will dive into a deeper understanding of self, representation, and consciousness through a Sci-Fi lens. 

Rasheedah Phillips will use Afrofuturism as a lens for exploring how one can time travel using everyday ​​tools such as memory, imagination, language, or crystals

Gray Area Festival

Schedle to be announced

http://grayareafestival.io/bio/rasheedah-phillips

http://grayareafestival.io/bio/moor-mother/

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A workshop exploring the relationship between justice, linear time constructs, and notions of the future in marginalized communities. Through exercises and discussion, participants will consider alternative temporalities embodied by Afrofuturism and its use as practical tools for shaping past and future narratives in communities. Presenters will provide examples from their socially engaged art, and community archive project exploring housing, histories, and futurities in North Philadelphia.

Thrift Element Apparel Co. Presents "Time: The Kalief Browder Story" Public Viewing and Fundraiser

Kalief Browder was a young African American man who was arrested at the age of 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was imprisoned for three years on Rikers Island without trial and spent most of this time in solitary confinement.

We will be viewing the critically acclaimed documentary series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story" executive produced by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter.

All funds will be donated to The Kalief Browder Scholarship Fund which allows ex-inmates the opportunity to complete their education at Bronx Community College.

Fund Raising items will be from Thrift Element's EXCLUSIVE new Spring/Summer Collection which honors the Forgotten Women of the Civil Rights Movement.

ALL AGES
LIGHT SNACKS
ACCESSIBLE SPACE 
*** Select T-Shirts and Notebooks will be available.****
**LIMITED SEATING** BYOS :)

For inquires or press/media : thriftelementapparel@gmail.com

We cordially invite you to participate in CFL Lit Club, a book + film discussion and screening series! This will be the last meeting for the near-term future. 

For meeting #3, we are reading Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales) by Rasheedah Phillips and screening part of the film Eve's Bayou. At the meeting we will discuss the themes of community, time, temporality,foresight, memory, future(s), the past(s), motherhood, Black womanhood and more in the book and film. 

We will have a few copies of Recurrence Plot in the CFL Library for lending or also suggest checking out from the local library. You can also email us at communityfutureslab@gmail.com to arrange purchase of a copy.

FREE (donations accepted)
ALL AGES
Space is accessible
Light snacks will be served

Author and founder of the Afrofuturist Affair Rasheedah Phillips discusses the foundations and future of Afrofuturism, a philosophy that challenges traditional notions of space, time, and technology to imagine alternative pasts and futures for the African Diaspora.

A companion to his legendary album of the same name, SPACE IS THE PLACE features jazz iconoclast Sun Ra as an intergalactic traveler intent on resettling a distant planet with African Americans. Traveling back to 1940s Chicago and to 1970s Oakland, Sun Ra faces off against the nefarious Overseer and a team of evil NASA scientists. Mind-bending, visually dazzling, and infused with electrifying music, SPACE IS THE PLACE is a landmark early work of Afrofuturist cinema, combining sharp social critique with visionary metaphysical theories. The feature will be preceded by the short RECURRENCE PLOT: THE FAMILY CIRCLE (2018), adapted from a short story by Rasheedah Phillips. In it, a memory-storing bracelet transports a young woman backward in time to the day of her own mother’s death, challenging the notion that time travels in only one direction.

An installation of sound, maps, surveys, and ephemera from the quantum time capsule of Community Futures Lab, a pop-up oral history/oral futures recording lab, community resource library, workshop space, and gallery located in North Philadelphia exploring eminent futures and temporal domains of housing and displacement. Community Futurisms considers time, memory, and temporality as experienced by people and communities identifying as Black or African-American in the United States and across the diaspora and explores alternative and cultural, communal, and personal temporal-spatial frameworks.

Presented by Other Music and MoMA PS1, Come Together: Music Festival and Label Market offers live performances, films, workshops, and panels that celebrate the interactive ecosystem of local and international music communities, along with a label fair featuring over 60 participants. Reasserting the central and essential role that communities play in both the creation and consumption of new sounds, Come Together recasts the fading record store experience for the current moment.

PERFORMANCES
Collaborative set bringing Black Quantum Futurism (Moor Mother and Rasheedah Phillips), Geng, and Matana Roberts together for the first time.
4:00 p.m. in the VW Dome

Tours of the Church of the Advocate's Black arts murals will be available in a free-flowing, informal style starting at 3:30. Come here the history behind the church and learn more about these murals.

This artists' roundtable starts at 4:30 p.m. and will feature a moderated panel followed by a Q&A. Our roundtable features: 

Poet Yolanda Wisher

Dancer and Choreographer Lela Aisha Jones

Curator and Festival Organizer Maori Holmes

Writer and Institution builder Rasheedah Phillips

The event closes with light refreshments and plenty of opportunity to mingle.

This is a free event. RSVP REQUIRED.

"The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory" - Jean Baudrillard

CFL Presents: SIMULACRA, a week-long artistic residency at Community Futures Lab with Pittsburgh-based artist and activist Joy KMT ( Tabernacle of Immaculate Perception + Sanctuary Pittsburgh) creating, performing, mapping, workshopping, and experimenting with new material.

Artist Statement:
For Black people in America whose ancestors were enslaved, the map of reality was created through Blackness and Blackness has been defined by the map. In this residency, I intend to define the terrain of hyperreality through the lens of Blackness using various modalities, as well as create new maps of reality based upon what has survived and chart a trajectory towards a reality that rejects euphemisms and connects our bodies, our minds and our hearts to a Black Future.

EVENTS (times to be announced soon):
March 22 – Public Workshop 
March 23 – Artist Talk and Performance
March 24 – SIMULACRA/F.A.M Closing Reception

FEATURING
Hosted / Reading by Camae Ayewa

/open share / exchange / peer edit / open questions / talk out ideas / critique/zine-making
 

On March 20th, Councilwoman Helen Gym and Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez will hold a Council hearing to examine the eviction crisis, substandard housing conditions, and risk of homelessness faced by low-income Philly renters.
FB Invite: https://www.facebook.com/events/1395614357156432/

The last Housing Futures workshop will be used to prepare for the hearing. We will provide an overview of the issues and provide talking points and tips for engaging your friends, neighbors, and elected officials on these issues. We will gather stories of housing experiences. We will also spend the meeting making signs and posters in support of the hearing. 

FREE
ALL AGES
ACCESSIBLE SPACE
NO RSVP Required

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Housing Futures is a monthly series of interactive Landlord-Tenant workshops at Community Futures Lab, presented by Rasheedah Phillips, CFL Project Co-Director and Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia and other special guests

Sharswood Thrash: Exploring Community Futures at the Lab
An event to celebrate Dox Thrash, his art and influence, and continue his legacy in Sharswood - not another community meeting!

Dox Thrash moved to Sharswood in 1925 after traveling around the country practicing art and working various jobs. Dox Thrash saw Shaswood as a community where he could use his talents as an artist, a community activist, and a mentor. He made many contributions to the burgeoning Afro art movement and promoted the social and economic welfare of his community.

The focus of this event is to continue Dox Thrash's legacy. It is about possible action, invention, and collaboration. Sharswood Thrash is to raise awareness of Dox Thrash, his influence, and explore ideas to continue that in Sharswood today.

Event will be held on March 11 and March 18 from 3-5pm at Community Futures Lab (2204 Ridge Ave)

Facilitated by Dox Thrash House
IG/Dox.Thrash

ALL AGES
ACCESSIBLE SPACE
LIGHT REFRESHMENTS

FREE ADMISSION!!!!

***ABOUT THE EVENT***
The evening features two sets by Moor Mother, working under the theme of Community Futurism, in collaboration with Black Quantum Futurism and the Community Futures Lab. The first set includes improv collaboration of live instrumentation with drums, saxophone, bass, synth, and text. The second features music from the album Fetish Bones as well as unreleased songs by Moor Mother. Artists include Rasheedah Phillips, Madam Data, Keir on sax, Philip on drums, and George and Steve on bass. 

Sharswood Thrash: Exploring Community Futures at the Lab
An event to celebrate Dox Thrash, his art and influence, and continue his legacy in Sharswood - not another community meeting!

Dox Thrash moved to Sharswood in 1925 after traveling around the country practicing art and working various jobs. Dox Thrash saw Shaswood as a community where he could use his talents as an artist, a community activist, and a mentor. He made many contributions to the burgeoning Afro art movement and promoted the social and economic welfare of his community.

The focus of this event is to continue Dox Thrash's legacy. It is about possible action, invention, and collaboration. Sharswood Thrash is to raise awareness of Dox Thrash, his influence, and explore ideas to continue that in Sharswood today.

Event will be held on March 11 and March 18 from 3-5pm at Community Futures Lab (2204 Ridge Ave)

Facilitated by Dox Thrash House
IG/Dox.Thrash

ALL AGES
ACCESSIBLE SPACE
LIGHT REFRESHMENTS

F.A.M., or Future Access Memory: is a Community Futures Lab exhibition that functions much like RAM (Random Access Memory) does: as real-time processing space. We are curating a space for local community members to engage what they want to see from the futures that they stand before: artistic futures, familial futures, black futures, personal futures. F.A.M. is a real-time processing space to think about, dream about, and conjure up the futures we want to live in. 

Artists whose work will be present include:

- Darnell Henry. Darnell Henry is a painter and visual artist from the Sharswood neighborhood of North Philadelphia.

- Ruby Gem

- Winslow Laroche. Winslow Laroche is a multidisciplinary artist born on the planet Earth.

- Also being featured are future event maps of liberation strategies envisioned through communal concepts of liberation, abolition, freedom and reform made possible througt the work of the students of the Franklin Learning Center.

- Other artists TBA

Work will be up in the CFL Gallery through March 2017. 

ALL AGES
ACCESSIBLE SPACE
LIGHT REFRESHMENTS 

For more information and viewing hours, please contact us at communityfutureslab@gmail.com

The reading group will culminate in a public forum in which two artists, one community activist and a few members of the group will open the discussion to a wider audience. The forum is set for 5-7 p.m. Feb. 28 in the Lally Reading Room of Schaffer Library. Panel speakers include John Jennings, Reynolds Anderson and Rasheedah Phillips.  - See more at: https://www.union.edu/news/stories/2017/01/reading-group-forms-for-afrofuturism-exhibit.php#sthash.0XPxDEfX.C1lcb3Wl.dpuf

Interactive Workshop on Octavia Butler's 'Kindred' and Time Travel

Using Octavia Butler's novel 'Kindred' to center the discussion, Rasheedah Phillips of Afrofuturist Affair will lead a workshop on practical time travel.

Black Women Lives: States of Matter

Community discussion on the state of affairs for Black women and girls in Philadelphia and the creation of a community action plan that addresses education, housing, state violence, and more. 

*Featuring brief presentations by:
- Yvelisse Pelotte, Esq. - Staff Attorney at Education Law Center Her work focuses on school climate and equal school access issues, with particular attention to the disproportionate discipline and exclusion of Black girls.
- Whiquitta Tobar, Esq. - Zubrow Fellow in Children's Law at Juvenile Law Center. Her work focuses on child welfare and juvenile justice.
- Rasheedah Phillips, Esq. - Managing Attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia whose work focuses on eviction defense and preservation of safe, affordable, and healthy housing for low-income Philadelphians

* Screening and discussion of #SayHerName short documentary by The African American Policy Forum

* Creation of a community action plan for protecting and celebrating Black women and girls in our communities

FREE
ALL AGES - ALL GENDERS - BLACK AND POC ONLY EVENT -ACCESSIBLE SPACE
Light refreshments will be served
Please RSVP at communityfutureslab@gmail.com

We cordially invite you to participate in CFL Lit Club, a book + film discussion and screening series! 
For club meeting #2, we are reading Wild Seed by Octavia Butler and screening part of the film adaptation of Beloved by Toni Morrison. At the meeting we will discuss the themes of hauntings, community, time, temporality, memory, slavery, future(s), the past(s), motherhood, Black womanhood in the books and film. 

The focus of the disucssion will be on Wild Seed and Beloved film; however Wild Seed is a relatively quick read, so if people finish reading early, feel free to pick upanother book in the Patternist series (we suggest Mind of My Mind!) to add to the discussion and/or read Beloved the novel. 

We will have a few copies of Wild Seed in the CFL Library for lending or also suggest checking out from the local library. You can also email us at communityfutureslab@gmail.com to arrange purchase of a copy for $4.

Afro-futurism and Black Science Fiction, Jaimie Boadnax, Rasheedah Philips, & Ytasha Womack | Linsly Chittenden Hall (LC), 63 High Street, Room 317

What is afrofuturism? How is it represented? This panel will look critically how black science fiction and afrofuturism are creating new, innovative forms of blackness.

Housing Futures Workshop 4 - Fair Housing and Disability Rights

Fair Housing and Disability Rights 
Thursday February 16, 2017 | 3:30-5:30pm

We will be joined by the Fair Housing Rights Center of Southeastern PA for a workshop on fair housing rights and laws for residents who need accommodations to their unit in order to live comfortably in their homes with a disability. During this workshop attendees will learn about housing discrimination against persons with disabilities, resident rights to reasonable accommodations and modifications, and landlord obligations under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), with examples and scenarios. Come with questions!

FREE
ALL AGES
ACCESSIBLE SPACE

Please RSVP at communityfutureslab@gmail.com 

• “Community Futurisms: Time and Memory in Sharswood-Blumberg”, Rasheedah Phillips, Community Legal Solutions

transmediale 2017 - featuring Black Quantum Futurism

transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology. The activities of transmediale aims at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies.

Using Octavia Butler's novel 'Kindred' to center the discussion, Rasheedah Phillips of Afrofuturist Affair will lead a workshop on practical time travel.

Housing Futures Workshop 3 - Criminal Records and Housing Rights

PEOPLE’S CRIMINAL RECORD EXPUNGEMENT CLINIC + HOUSING AND CRIMINAL REENTRY RIGHTS WORKSHOP WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 7, 2016 | 2PM-5PM

Community Legal Services of Philadelphia's Employment Unit will provide legal advice, expungements and record sealing on the spot for eligible citizens. People's Paper Co-op will be working with participants to shred their criminal records and turn them into new sheets of beautiful handmade paper. We will also present a workshop on housing rights for tenants with criminal records.

*Expungement may be possible for non-conviction charges (i.e., nolle prossed, not guilty, dismissed or withdrawn), summary convictions and special programs like ARD or Section 17 (records/charges are NOT automatically erased). Expungement is generally not possible for felony or misdemeanor charges that resulted in a conviction (i.e., guilty, guilty plea or nolo contender plea).

Free
All Ages
Accessible Space

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Housing Futures is a monthly series of interactive Landlord-Tenant workshops at Community Futures Lab, presented by Rasheedah Phillips, CFL Project Co-Director and Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

Environmental Justice Mixer & Update with Rep. Bullock

Please join State Representative Donna Bullock for a meet-and-greet reception in honor of the 25th Anniversary of the adoption of 17 Principles of Environmental Justice at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991 in Washington D.C. Since its adoption, the principles have served as the defining document and basis for the grassroots movement for environmental justice.

On October 26, 2016, Rep. Donna Bullock introduced House Resolution 1108 in the PA House of Representatives commemorating the anniversary of the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice. Gathered together at the summit, delegates established a national and international movement on behalf of all people of color to fight the destruction of lands and communities and to re-establish their spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of Mother Earth. In addition, the delegates strove to create a level of respect for differing cultures, languages, and beliefs about the natural world and their role in healing themselves, ensuring environmental justice, and to promote economic alternatives that would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods.

In the spirit of the adoption of the 17 Principles, this event is a gathering of today’s environmental and social justice professionals, activists, and community members to connect with one another and continue expanding a network of people who are fighting for environmental justice in Philadelphia.

Light refreshments will be provided, and Rep. Donna Bullock will share an environmental legislative update from her first term in Harrisburg.

We cordially invite you to participate in CFL Lit Club, a book + film discussion and screening series! Book discussions and film screenings will be hosted in December, February, and the last one in April. We are taking suggestions for reading and screenings for future lit clubs. 

For club meeting #1, we are reading Mama Day and screening the miniseries adaptation of the novel, The Women of Brewster Place, both by Gloria Naylor (who recently passed on Sept 28 - Rest in Power). At the meeting we will discuss the themes of community, time, temporality, memory, motherhood, Black womanhood in the books, as well as screen some of the miniseries adaptation. 

We will have a few copies of Mama Day in the CFL Library for lending or also suggest checking out from the local library. You can also email us at communityfutureslab@gmail.com to arrange purchase of a copy for $4.

Housing Futures Workshop 2 - Tenant Rights Overview

This workshop is a crash course on tenants’ rights. The workshop covers a wide variety of topics including: eviction protections, getting security deposits back, dealing with habitability and repair problems, illegal lockouts, and how to prepare for a Landlord-Tenant hearing. We will be joined by Attorney Rebecca Meschio of the Philadelphia Landlord/Tenant Legal Help Center.

​

'FLESH' Premiere!

The time has come for the debut of Monika Estrella's directorial debut of 'FLESH'.

A heavy mix of avant garde/horror, 'FLESH' is a fifteen minute journey that redefines narratives within the horror genre.

The first in a monthly series of interactive Landlord-Tenant workshops at Community Futures Lab, presented by Rasheedah Phillips, CFL Project Co-Director and Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

October - Housing Rights for Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Survivors 

This workshop explores the barriers to safe and affordable housing for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault . We will review housing policies and laws aimed at protecting the rights of domestic violence and sexual assault survivors to safe and affordable housing, and use case scenarios to demonstrate real-life applications of these protections. 

In addition, attendees will discuss ideas for best practices and advocacy strategies that can be developed to further reduce the barriers between victims affected by domestic and sexual violence and stable housing.

In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness month, the workshop will include information and resources from Women Against Abuse 

NEW WORK: AN EVENING OF READINGS, DISCUSSION AND WORKSHOP OF NEW WORK 

FEATURING
Hosted / Reading by Camae Ayewa/ who will be reading from her new book of poetry "FETISH BONES'

/open share / exchange / peer edit / open questions / talk out ideas / critique
 

Girls Rock Philly stands on 10 years of community organizing that has brought together youth, musicians, educators, and friends passionate about transforming our Philadelphia soundscapes. Together we’re building liberatory futures through song and joy. We could not have done it without you! Come celebrate with us on October 8th!
_________________________________________________

⭐The night will include⭐

PERFORMANCES FEATURING
Sa-Roc (ATL/DC),
Black Quantum Futurism (Moor Mother + The AfroFuturist Affair)
Dj Haram and Marcelline of ATM
and Girls Rock Philly's very own youth performers:
Third Bass, Wolf Pack, and DJ Dash! 

Black Oak House is extraordinarily excited to present the first Solo Gallery Exhibition by Black Quantum Futurism. Black Quantum Futurism encompasses a collaborative practice by prolific performance, sound, media, and literary artistsRasheedah Phillips and Came Ayewa. Phillips and Ayewa present an exhibition of works in the gallery space extending and focusing recent work in group exhibitons at Vox Populi and other national venues. We welcome you to experience a practice deeply engaged in "world building" - a practice that compulsively creates its own context in a cultural vacuum and populates it with a universe of creative objects, concepts, narratives, and dreams.

Join ICA for an evening of music and performance by Black Quantum Futurism (Rasheedah Phillips + Moor Mother) featuring readings by Metropolarity, soundscapes by MOM2, music by jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, and free tarot readings with prophetesses. Help yourself to free takeaway Black Quantum Futurism tarot cards, and a takeaway screenprinted poster featuring a BQF chart for do-it-yourself space-time shifting. BQF will also set up an Oral Future booth, with a time and memory survey.

Join us as we consider what technologies are practically and readily available to us to help shift/adjust/manipulate/augment/enhance our experiences of space-time at will. Black Quantum Futurism is exploring and developing temporal technologies that are more beneficial to marginalized peoples' survival in a “high-tech” world currently dominated by oppressive, fatalistic linear time constructs. 

Law and governance are intimately entangled with time. This international conference will explore time’s fraught relationship with law, governance and ordering: the use of time in projects of discipline, the significance of time to resistance, the creation of new temporal horizons and experiences through technological innovation, as well as other themes.

The Free Black Woman's Library

The Free Black Women's Library is a Brooklyn-based interactive mobile library that features over 420 books written by and about Black women. The library centers and celebrates the art, music, history and stories of Black women and girls worldwide. All books are available via trade. http://thefreeblackwomanslibrary.tumblr.com/ Please feel free to bring a good book written by a Black women to donate or trade.

Curated by Betty Yu

Opening reception:
Wednesday, March 18, 6-8 PM

On view March 19 - May 16, 2020
291 Church Street, NYC

​

Featuring Work By:
Black Quantum Futurism
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Chinatown Art Brigade
Sandra de la Loza
Robin Holder
Betty Yu

​

Working class communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color across U.S. cities have been disproportionately impacted by hyper-gentrification and displacement over the last fifteen years.

Is it possible to disrupt dominant narratives that depict gentrification as “inevitable” and a “natural” part of urban evolution—monolithic assertions that often come from real estate speculators, developers, extractive industries and the 1%? Can we harness our collective resources and trace a new trajectory that allows communities to flourish without being priced out of our neighborhoods?

Imagining De-gentrified Futures is an interactive exhibition attempting to imagine socially-just futures for our cities and aiming to rethink the assumed trajectory of urban development. Drawing inspiration from anti-gentrification resistance across the U.S., decolonization movements, and Afrofuturism, this exhibition gives permission to imagine, to dream, to unleash and explore ways in which socially-just futures can exist for city communities.

Works on view take a variety of approaches to examine and suggest strategies for the challenges in cities like Hollywood, Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York City’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.