« A reasoned conversation about how artists and curators of all backgrounds represent collective traumas and racial injustice would, in an ideal world, be a regular occurrence in art museums and schools. [Yet, it is a deeply puritanical and anti-intellectual strain to] putting moral judgment before aesthetic understanding. We may understand artworks to be indicators of racial, gender, and class privilege — I do, often. But presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path. » Coco Fusco
Category: Syncretics
backfire
« I’ve been doing this for about a decade and have never once received an invitation to come to the US, so I have to assume there isn’t much interest. When it’s not negative, (…) it’s not as appealing to the public because there isn’t this great story, this very compassionate story. (…) Planets and stars and futurism and time travel – these types of visions aren’t supposed to come from black guys from Detroit. » Jeff Mills, co-founder of the Underground Resistance collective.
On love and violence
« All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain […]. Yes, it does indeed mean something ― something unspeakable ― to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum ; there is no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. »
3 steps to Afrofuturism: EXPANSION(S)
SF and other fantasy genres are no longer counter-cultures, as they lost their alternative and sometimes subversive nature. However, sustainable development brings the future closer and urges us to change the present, the here and now. Knowledge & practices also expend, as well as styles & references that changed the notion of margins (dematerialized spaces, virtual communities etc.). AFROFUTURISM thus engages in a global, creative change full of actions. From the point of view of people who were outcast for centuries and have incarnated alterity, afrofuturism more than ever addresses the whole world. Inclusive and frentic, heterogeneous and free, trans (meaning « going through »), it invites us to perform the world.
3 steps to Afrofuturism: CONCEPTUALISATION
Afrofuturism’s relation to fiction and even sometimes science-fiction helped it come forward. It is more than a way to esape, as it offers alternatives to a present that we have no grasp on and that can deprive us from our existence. It is the advent of using new imaginaries as critical tools to question the world in order to come up with new narrations of History. Afrofuturism is full of authors who present new — more or less radical but always new — representations of the world in order to think of, imagine and concretize another version of the world. Beyond dreams, Afrofuturism becomes a prospective methodology.
3 steps to Afrofuturism: INCARNATION
Afrofuturism is first a matter of individual paths. Between personal fantacies, provocation and leadership, it comes from strong and free-minded characters, and its mission is to give everyone enough courage to free themselves and to define themselves. Afrofuturism plays with common or imposed laws and habits, it writes its own mythology and manifesto. Musicians have benefitted from the popularity of « black music » to broadcast their eclectic, impossible and dense message. Afrofuturism is then an original and auto-determined way of life : it is the strength of the myth.
B(s)ttf x Quai Branly
« Week-ends » are a new rendez-vous allowing you to discover exhibitions from an exclusive point of view !
Musicians, dancers, plasticians, story tellers and lecturers settle in the museum to make you live a unique moment around the exhibition « The Color Line – African-American Artists and Segregation » and explore no less than 150 years of history of African-American art. Free activities, free access or access with ticket to the museum.
Ousmane Snow, the first black man to enter the French Academy of Fine Arts
“My nomination is even more valuable to me that you always had the wisdom not to establish racial, ethnical or religious quotas to be admitted among you”. Unanimously elected in 2013, the eighty-years-old Senegalese sculptor follows Léopold Sédar Senghor’s footsteps, elected at the French Academy thirty years earlier, and to whom he paid tribute during his enthronement. This event will surely and durably shake-up the African Diaspora: after the constant search for role models, the awareness of a possible future. Oneself.”
Ethiopian condominiums : “prisons” or golden cities ?
Since 2005, the Ethiopian government has embarked on a broad policy of urban renewal and construction. To meet the growing demand for housing in the Ethiopian cities, he has built nearly 80,000 condominiums. The majority are located in Addis Ababa […]. 63,677 families have already received an apartment in a condominium. The town hall distributes them through a lottery system. Those who have won the lottery then have 30 years to pay 40,000 birr which are about 1800 euros, required by the city to become the proud owners of their new apartments. (Slate Africa)
About cultural appropriation : facts and circumstances
« A Japanese teen wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a big American company is not the same as Madonna sporting a bindi as part of her latest reinvention. The difference is history and power. Colonization has made Western Anglo culture supreme – powerful and coveted. It is understood in its diversity and nuance as other cultures can only hope to be. Ignorance of culture that is a burden to Asians, African, and indigenous peoples, is unknown to most European descendants or at least lacks the same negative impact. » Tamara Winfrey Harris
Winged Horse // CHEVAL AILE
I am telling the story of a lifetime, coming and going between Africa and Europe, between Europe and the world, I am an hybrid, I am the product of a fusion of cultures and identities. But what is hybridation if we think of Pangaea’s principle and of the history of mankind? Can we really define ourselves depending on our origins, color, culture – a culture that keeps evolving with our environment ? Am I African, European? Isn’t the principle of universality more important? This brings us to the one and only essence of our being : humanity.
Firy Horse / Cheval de feu
The hardest thing is not to succeed, it is not even to find the will to succeed. The hardest thing is to be intellegible to yourself, to accept and admit that you can succeed. Find yourself, know yourself, connect to yourself in order to understand and conceive the world. Allowing yourself to be submerged by the euphoria of the impetus to take a step forward, like in a obstacle race. Magnify the ordeal of learning, willing and being courageous, through the elegance of a gesture of transmitting and sharing. And then… listen to your heart, to your inner voice… Isn’t it this intelligence that brings us love, strength, protection, trust and happiness ?