Speculative Fiction with FutureBrownSpace: Part Two
Sometimes we work with seemingly impossible situations. Sometimes the plot-lines of our environments would not pass muster in a T.V. series or movie; we just wouldn’t find it plausible. Why isn’t that situation being dealt with? Why are the scriptwriters ignoring these events and themes, or why is the glaringly obvious glided over? This is a chance to work with those situations, without being in fight or flight mode. Indeed, you may want to bring the fight into the foreground and work it to its conclusion. And the same goes for flight. How can we work through impossible situations in fiction rather than turning our feelings into felonies.
Mer om evenemanget/More about the event
“this dance through time travel that Afrofuturists live for is as much about soul retrieval as it is about jettisoning into the far-off future, the uncharted Milky Way, or the depths of the subconscious and imagination… Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total re-envisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.” Ytasha L.Womack. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture.
FutureBrownSpace (FBS) is an artistic research initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, of being, of activism or community.) It also delivers platforms for institutional conversations around racialization in Sweden.
Aim and research questions
This then, is a two-fold research in experimental black pedagogy based in performance practice and black study that hopes 1) to mitigate the subtle but pervasive violence that performs on the non-white psyche in public and institutional Swedish space in the form of minority stress, unconscious racism, double labour et al… 2) to bring our intimate experience and ethnographic expertise of the phenomenon of unconscious racism into a healing pedagogic encounter with institutions and organizations.
Research implementation and anticipated impact
The core of our practice is study – or you could say the core of our study is practice. The daily practice of being black or blackened. Because our study is the groove, the taste, the prayer, our scholarship, our moves, our lineage, our perfume, our roots, our looking fine, our laughter – our practice is black, black study, black consciousness, blackity black story and myth and historiography. It’s an “Is this black enuff for you?” ontology, distinct from science’s dodgy divisive methodologies, for anyone, anyone who wishes to appreciate, and join in its significance for a more coalitional less neo-colonial future; whether your access to it is through the brown, the queer, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, the transitional, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study. We do this through public seminars, workshops, performances, collaborations, institutional activism, community work, video work and through our publishing efforts at FutureBrownPress.
Instagram: Futurebrownspace