{"id":38531,"date":"2022-04-21T08:41:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T06:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/prospections\/practical-futurism-and-the-local-otherwise-black-quantum-futurism-camae-ayewa-and-rasheedah-phillips-in-conversation-with-jeanne-van-heeswijk-and-rachael-rakes\/"},"modified":"2022-11-02T10:38:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-02T09:38:21","slug":"practical-futurism-and-the-local-otherwise-black-quantum-futurism-camae-ayewa-and-rasheedah-phillips-in-conversation-with-jeanne-van-heeswijk-and-rachael-rakes","status":"publish","type":"prospection","link":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/prospections\/practical-futurism-and-the-local-otherwise-black-quantum-futurism-camae-ayewa-and-rasheedah-phillips-in-conversation-with-jeanne-van-heeswijk-and-rachael-rakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Futurism and the Local Otherwise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips) in conversation with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachael Rakes: <\/strong>I want to ask about the relationship between your work in art, theory, science, and creative production, and the advocacy and activism you do \u201con the ground.\u201d It would be nice to hear about how your political imaginaries come out of work and life in a local context in Philadelphia. In your artistic work it seems clear that a lot of the theory and ethos comes from daily witness and practice, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n

Rasheedah Phillips:<\/strong> For me the theory and practice are simultaneous, and have emerged side-by-side. I have written science fiction and have been interested in science fiction since I was a young person, a young child, and so that has always informed my thinking, especially in terms of how I show up to different things. I was a housing attorney before, working at a non-profit, working with low-income folks, and working in a community before I even considered myself an Afrofuturist or an artist. When I started considering myself as an artist or an Afrofuturist, I was already deeply rooted into community and into my engagement with the community, so my approach came to be around questions of: \u201cHow does Afrofuturism inform my work as a housing attorney?\u201d and \u201cHow does Afrofuturism inform my work in communities?\u201d and not the other way around. In the theory of Afrofuturism itself, for me, the approach was around: How does the term Afro modify the future for Black people, and what does that actually mean for people who are routinely cut off from their futures? It was always very practical; I always thought of it in a very practical way: \u201cWhat does it mean for the person I\u2019m representing in an eviction court to be able to have a more expansive future, or more expansive options, or a greater expansion of time?\u201d What I\u2019m having to negotiate is time\u2014as a temporal dimension of the future and thinking of the very literal ways in which these temporal domain is cut off from people though systemic racism. So in those different ways, both the practice and the theory have been very much grounded in those assumptions. This also applies to myself\u2014I also come from a low-income back-ground; I was a teen parent; I was a person who was told that I was not going to make it to college, that I was going to have more kids, and that my future was kind of written for me, for a long time. I learned to shift those cycles and to create the timeline that I wanted for myself, and not the one that I was being told was supposed to happen for me. That is just how I\u2019ve always approached these kinds of things.<\/p>\n

Camae Ayewa:<\/strong> How I grew up, I was able to witness a lot of what we now call \u201chacking\u201d of everyday situations. I grew up in a place where people really looked at the alternative ways that they could accomplish something. This is why I\u2019ve always been thinking \u201coutside of the box\u201d\u2014due to lack of resources, or just due to the miscellaneous everyday things that come up that take us off this supposedly linear path that we\u2019re on toward achieving what everyone is trying to achieve socially. I feel like I\u2019ve always been in neighborhoods that continue to be a reflection of this kind of hacking, of looking outside, or creating one\u2019s own economic mutual, shared relationships.<\/p>\n

RR:<\/strong> Maybe from here we can talk about your creative or professional roots around Philadelphia. Rasheedah, you mentioned being a lawyer and how that\u2019s influenced your work in both a local and theoretical sense. And Camae, I know that you came out of organizing music festivals, working as a musician, and various other kinds of creative, larger-scale, communitarian projects. I was curious if you could talk a bit about how those things influenced where you\u2019re at today, how you see working within community building, and the idea of what you\u2019ve deemed \u201ccommunity futurisms.\u201d<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019ve been organizing events and doing different things since college, and even in high school I was part of a young parents program where I organized workshops on student-life balance. So that\u2019s always been something I was interested in doing\u2014curating events and different things like that\u2014but then I had to choose a path in terms of being a lawyer and being a parent, and so I didn\u2019t really tap into my creative side for a while around that time. Then after I graduated law school, I started going to sci-fi conventions in and around Philadelphia that were very unwelcoming, and that were very white. I had just not yet tapped into the Afrofuturism world, but my experiences in those places inspired me to look for and be a part of other events that were dealing with science fiction and things like that. Then I came across an event that was happening in Georgia that was based around Afrofuturism at the Harriet Tubman Museum, and I was so inspired by that! I was like, \u201cOh, I want to bring that to Philly.\u201d I had been going to Camae\u2019s events too, and one of our friends used to throw a spoken word event and I was part of that and supporting that. So those events were just really inspiring me and made it seem like there could be something for Afrofuturism here in Philly. Platforms that would allow someone like me to come, read a story, not feel uncomfortable, and be surrounded by other people who are interested in these themes and topics\u2014that inspired me to create the Afrofuturist Affair<\/em>, which was a costume ball event that we held annually between 2011\u20132014 for creative people and artists. We had an art show that went along with it, where musicians, performers, and different folks came. The purpose of that event was also to raise money to be able to have a mutual aid fund, and although I didn\u2019t have the language at the time, that really was what we were starting. I actually called it the Futurist Fund, back in 2011, and that was meant to be for people who I was encountering in my workspace, as a legal services attorney, who were losing their homes, and all they needed was like 500 dollars, or in some cases 100 dollars, to pay back-rent. But in my role as their attorney, working at Community Legal Services, I couldn\u2019t give them that money, or it would have been inappropriate for me as their attorney to pay that money. The money that we generated from the event would be put into this fund for people to be able to access it to use it for different needs. And so that\u2019s what we did for the first couple of years of the event: we created the Futurist Fund, and then held the event and made it accessible, made the tickets around 10 dollars, and that was one of my first events and dealings with that\u2014it was directly tied into these communities.<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> For me, creating these situations or events was really about stretching what we could do, you know? The first thing we wanted to do was to have a place to play, but because of the boundaries that so many people hold, we didn\u2019t fit in anywhere\u2014because we were using all different types of genres and because we were speaking about situations outside of ourselves. In Philadelphia, the music scenes were formed around hardcore punk, neo-soul, and hip-hop. There really wasn\u2019t a space for the avant-garde\u2014which is what I would call it now, but back then we just thought that we were wild or something. So once I was able to host some events, it was like, \u201cOkay. What more can we do?\u201d And the answer was that I wanted to throw a festival. We all wanted to play a festival, so I thought, \u201cWhy are we going to wait for someone to invite us to one?\u201d With the ROCKERS! <\/em>festival we did a BBQ Weekend, it wasn\u2019t a case of, \u201cOh, we need this money\u201d\u2014it was about creating interesting situations that people could just find themselves at. So, this was early, but we did a Sun Ra screening, we did yoga, and none of us even knew what yoga was. We did a basketball game, we did an outdoor sci-fi reading, and those kind of things.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> It was so fun.<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> Yeah, it was great! I can\u2019t even believe how we pulled this off. I mean my only worry was to have enough money for hamburgers for everyone, and I had to cook them. So it was just beautiful to provide this kind of think tank, that is what I call it now, for artists to explore different possibilities within their work. All of the artists that performed are all incredible and now way more established than they were when we were all just figuring things out. When we first started getting contacted by European agents they would say, \u201cHow many people are in the group?\u201d and we\u2019d say, \u201cOh, well, actually it\u2019s twelve of us,\u201d or, \u201cActually, it\u2019s just eight, but we all have our different groups.\u201d Each artist creates their own different group, because they\u2019re inspiring the people that are close to them in their communities. When you really look at it, it\u2019s like a bunch of different constellations, and every-one is bringing new stuff in. Some people are like, \u201cHey, I\u2019m working with youth now, so we\u2019re bringing this in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeanne van Heeswijk:<\/strong> Knowing about the trajectory of your work, there\u2019s always been these time-space formations being created that allowed certain people to meet and collaborate, and that created a kind of space through which other futures could be rehearsed and practiced or even formed. Whether it was ROCKERS! <\/em>(2007), Metropolarity<\/em> (2012), Afrofuturist Affair<\/em> (2011\u20132014), the Community Futures Lab<\/em> (2016), or Black Women Temporal Portal<\/em> (2018), there are many projects that are configurations allowing for different cross-connections to emerge. Could you maybe elaborate more on that?<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> They\u2019re very intentional constructions of space and time. Curation is an overused word, but we\u2019re very much crafting or building an experience when we\u2019re doing these different things. These are experiences, spaces, and space-times that I, as a Black person, have felt locked out of. I\u2019ve felt locked out of a space-time where I can talk about sci-fi and time travel and all these other things, or where I can talk about my safety as a Black person through this particular kind of lens. I\u2019ve never had those space-times, so I\u2019ve had to create them and co-create them with people. It\u2019s very intentional and it also feeds into how we think about time itself, and how we\u2019re influenced by time. A lot of our thinking is based around Afrodiasporic traditions of space and time that are not locked into a calendar\u2019s date or a clock\u2019s time. It\u2019s very much informed by us coming together and creating that space and time, and that being a privileged space in and of itself is made meaningful by us coming together and creating it. We\u2019re very much guided by those principles in terms of how we create projects, and our projects are life projects. We\u2019re influenced by ourselves just as much as anything else in our community. We come from the community that we\u2019re in, we\u2019re not artists flying in with a kind of detachment or separation; we are of this community\u2014we are of the space-times that we create. I am of the Black Women Temporal Portal<\/em> as a queer, mother, person who\u2019s been locked out of certain things, and I have had to create space-times where I feel safe, where my child feels safe, where my neighbor feels safe, and where our friends feel safe. So, yeah, it\u2019s very intentional.<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> I guess I would say that we learn, too, from each space. I\u2019m thinking back to our first residency called Neighborhood Time Exchange<\/em> (2015), where we had our studio that we would go and visit every day. The big impact was just trying to learn how to better integrate our practice with what\u2019s going on in the community, forming deeper relationships. With being an artist in residence, it\u2019s so time-based, and it\u2019s funny that this one was called Neighborhood Time Exchange<\/em>, because in this situation it was almost like we were hired graphic designers. We knew that we were so much more than that, especially coming from all the events and projects that we have just mentioned\u2014we can whip up an event in five minutes, and I mean we are on the pulse! But it was this time constraint that led us to feel, \u201cOh, well, we\u2019re in charge of making a pamphlet,\u201d but we wanted to be more integrated, to be more than just some hired graphic designers. As we started to create more spaces and go to more residencies after that, we really made a point of being in control of our own agency over how we created the relationships, rather than having to create relationships in accordance with what the residency wanted.<\/p>\n

JvH:<\/strong> One of the things that you proposed through A Blade of Grass Fellowship was, of course, the creation of the Community Futures Lab<\/em> in 2016. Its aim was to address that question of the time-space of the community residency, but within your own neighborhood in Sharswood, Philadelphia\u2014using the residency as a way to enlarge that time-space to talk about \u201cdurational belonging,\u201d as I would call it.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> Definitely, and it\u2019s interesting that I\u2019ve never really thought about it that way, but it is like a permanent residency. With the Community Futures Lab<\/em> we were really able to expand, and we learned so much from it. We still have relationships with some of the folks from Neighborhood Time Exchange<\/em> that we worked with over there in West Philly, but it was super limited; it was prescribed, in a way, around this exchange with the community, but even the idea of exchange was uneven, and we didn\u2019t have time to really explore those kinds of relationships in that way. So the Community Futures Lab <\/em>in Sharswood did give us space to expand and time to expand, and it wasn\u2019t time-limited. We also live in the community, and it was a space where we often passed by\u2014literally every day to work I would pass by this space. But I was also involved as an attorney, working with folks in the community, so there were all of those different pathways of connection. It\u2019s just beautiful to still be working with that community very closely. I\u2019m the zoning chair now on the Brewerytown Sharswood Community Civic Association Zoning Subcommittee. I\u2019m working with these folks almost every day\u2014every week we\u2019re talking.<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> It definitely gave us experience, or more experience, with this self-guided residency\u2014not saying that we ever called it that\u2014that kind of merged with us being a part of the community as a resource. That merge happened pretty seamlessly, of being in-residence to the neighborhood, but also having the agency to be self-guided through that, and experiment and question together different angles of running the Community Futures Lab<\/em>:<\/strong> a lot of innovative ideas in the form of workshops, and in how we start and end an event.<\/p>\n

JvH:<\/strong> I visited two or three events in the Community Futures Lab<\/em>, and it was important to see that it worked as a gathering space but also as a library, a space of production, and a space of questioning. It worked as a drop-in space for whoever felt like they needed a place to drop into. How it was programmed was not prescriptive but grew from that what was needed; it sort of unfolded when you were there. So I like the fact that you call this a \u201cself-guided residence\u201d\u2014you saw it grow and shift over time. I just saw recently you were having this great program again about community history and community voices, so it\u2019s not something that went away when you no longer were having the space. Again, it was not only depending on a space: it was just depending on a space-time fluidity in the neighborhood that you, from the physical space, create into a sort of a continuum that\u2019s there now.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> I knew that I could not run a space forever, and we went into this being really intentional about not wanting us to be drop-in artists into the community. Whether the project continued to be funded or not, what were elements of it that would continue, and that could grow and be dynamic and be responsive to what the community needs and wants from us\u2014from the perspective of what we can provide in terms of our skills as both a housing attorney and advocate, and artist and musician? So it has integrated and shifted, and it also allows us to have elements of it that go out into the world: there\u2019s been a Community Futures Lab <\/em>at Chicago Architecture Biennial; we\u2019ve had the Oral Futures Booth<\/em> (2018), which originated in the Community Futures Lab<\/em>, that has been in multiple exhibitions including in Marseille and London; and now we\u2019re creating an Oral Futures Booth<\/em> for Village of Arts and Humanities, which is in North Philadelphia. So it\u2019s now coming back to North Philly, but it\u2019s also still in North Philly, because we\u2019re still connected to the community in Sharswood. And there\u2019s now this online piece of it, the FuturesLab.Community<\/em> site, so it just continues in iterations.<\/p>\n

RR:<\/strong> Camae, you were talking about witnessing a specific kind of constellation at the time you were doing ROCKERS!<\/em> You mentioned this multi-point thing where you\u2019re doing cultural events, but they\u2019re also community-building, and realizing that there are all these intersecting groups. I\u2019m curious what that constellation looks like to you these days, in Philly?<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> These days, well, I\u2019m in isolation because of the pandemic. I\u2019ve been creating a lot of music, because that\u2019s my job and my studio is right here, so that\u2019s all I do\u2014trying to pull people into my music and things like that. I\u2019m trying to do more of this pulling people in, especially with Metropolarity<\/em>. But we always work in different kinds of ways with each other: I\u2019ll have a friend write my liner notes for my album, or maybe read a sci-fi story over one of my tracks, but it\u2019s been very limited lately. I want to do things, but it\u2019s so hard here in the winter. I mean, it is just so hard for me to really get out there, but before the pandemic we were always out. We would\u2019ve hosted events in December, right? We had little things, but something about it now is just so hard as everything closed down. I wanted to start some things, and I started the frameworks for them, but I haven\u2019t brought it all together. I want to start this kind of mutual mentoring between avant-garde artists\u2014like a peer-mentorship but not so taxing. Because I\u2019ve been mentoring with some graduate sound students; you know, it can be a little taxing, with everyone going through all these emotions. With the mutual mento-ring I want to have just more of an outlet to just speak with people from different levels within the avant-garde world, and particularly Black women artists that are really isolated. I have a good colleague who is in Finland, and is very isolated, but does a lot of work with promoting women electronic artists, so I\u2019m looking for some way to bring us together virtually. I\u2019m not a virtual person; I\u2019ve never even liked videos of myself, so it\u2019s definitely been a weird adjustment on that end. But people are really getting innovative, which is really nice. There\u2019s a rapper who invited me to perform inside of a game of Minecraft, where I would have an avatar. We\u2019re thinking about some ways that it can still be meaningful; we\u2019ve done some great work as far as programming with Black Quantum Futurism. We had Time Camp 001<\/em> (2017), which was over two weekends, it was incredible, and we just did a series of workshops in February 2021\u2014I did a poetry workshop. We\u2019re getting this virtual way of doing things, and this platform, together, figuring out how to connect people that are in isolation. We realized that not all quarantines look the same, and we really want to bring together the artists in the places that are hit hardest.<\/p>\n

RR:<\/strong> Rasheedah, most of your legal work is around housing. I imagine that must be really intense right now.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> Oh yeah. It\u2019s extremely, extremely intense right now. I\u2019m working 12-hour days, every day, and I don\u2019t even go to court. I focus on policy work around housing, and so, as you might imagine, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s happening over where you guys live, but in the US there are various eviction procedures happening. Rental assistance is available, but there are things that need to happen so that people don\u2019t get harmed in the future. I\u2019m working very hard right now around a lot of this stuff, and then I co-manage a staff of 28 people, many of whom go to court on a daily basis, representing people in court who are facing eviction.<\/p>\n

JvH:<\/strong> I think your daily work is a reflection of what is actually currently happening in the world. I think this is interesting, given that your work is predominantly about futures. Working with the present is like seeding futures. Could you say something about how you\u2019re working with the present?\u00a0<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> I think we have just become fluid in code-switching around time, as it were. I think the pandemic has made everybody a little more fuzzy with time things, but as part of our practice, and just as who we are, we know how to work both within the linear, capitalist time-scheme that we have to be a part of right now, but we also know how to trouble that time-scheme. We do this using the tools of Afrofuturism, the tools that we have developed as Black Quantum Futurism, and the tools of our ancestors and how they think about time. It makes it easy to see that linear time and western capitalist time is not the only way of being in time when you immerse yourself in that other way, and take it very seriously. When you take that very seriously, it\u2019s natural to understand how the past, the future, and the present are connected; it\u2019s more about constructing language for other people to understand it, than it is about how we live it and deal with it. I think that\u2019s what our practice is about and what it focuses on.<\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> I think that we\u2019ve always been like this, since we started. Ever since our mutual friend said we should check out each others\u2019 blogs, we were always this way. Because you\u2019ve got to understand: we\u2019ve been doing this work, and then just waiting for different types of opportunity. My first album was released in 2016, but those songs had been years old. You get what I\u2019m saying? They were still speaking of what was happening right there in 2016, and that goes with what you were saying earlier about the type of upbringing that we come from\u2014we learned that there is this quantum theme on top of every-thing. It\u2019s these circumstances that we find ourselves in. Not everything is an open and shut case. There\u2019s all these influences and situations that we fall victim to. So this is how we look at the world. We can\u2019t just see something as if it\u2019s stuck in time, or frozen in time; we have to look at it from, \u201cOh, what was it like when our parents were young? What was going on?\u201d There are so many connections with everything, and I think that\u2019s the best thing about Black Quantum Futurism\u2014we\u2019re not just looking at the whole of every-thing, we\u2019re looking at all the different pieces that come to make that whole. The Quantum Event Map workshop that we do really speaks to this, because there\u2019s so many different influences. Rasheedah just did a great online workshop talking about systemic racism, really breaking down all the factors that are at play.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> For that workshop, we were looking at the different levels of racism and how they influence each other, whether at the personal level, at the interpersonal level, and at the institutional and structural level. Another example of this is an exercise you came up with, Camae, the Housing Journey Map.<\/em> It\u2019s an exercise we had people do in our workshops, to look at their journey through time and space at all the different places they\u2019ve lived, and how those places influence them now, and how they influence their privilege or their access.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> And looking at why they had to move. Whether it\u2019s, \u201cOh, we got forced out of this place,\u201d or \u201cThis was no longer safe,\u201d you know? Compared to some people who have the privilege of saying, \u201cWe saw this great listing for a bigger house, we just went for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

JvH:<\/strong> I want to ask about your residency at CERN, Geneva, and some of the other big projects you have coming up. How will you utilize those residencies to foster your work?<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> So there\u2019s two residencies that we\u2019re working on. One is a fellowship that I\u2019m working on more, but Camae is going to help of course, called Time Zone Protocols<\/em> (2020\u20132022) at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York. That one is focused on the protocols of time and time zones, and in particular the International Prime Meridian Conference<\/em> in 1884, where 25 countries came together to decide upon the world\u2019s prime meridian location at Greenwich, England. I\u2019m looking at the social-historical context of that, at what was happening for Black people and the Black American community around that time, and at how the setting of those time zones impacted us and our communities, and continues to do so. The Time Zone Protocols<\/em> project studies the protocols of this conference, like how their outcome came about with no input of people of color, as there was no one of color and no women at that conference. We actually want to reconfigure that conference and hold our own sort of International Meridian Conference.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

CA:<\/strong> We\u2019re working with multiple different kind of times at once. Sometimes it gets a little complex, I guess, because you still have to deal with how the world views time. That\u2019s been the thing we\u2019ve said since we started Black Quantum Futurism, especially with Rasheedah, being like, \u201cI have a kid, you know? I have to think about these time constraints, and I have to think about the way that I\u2019m viewed if I\u2019m late, if I\u2019m this, or if I\u2019m that.\u201d We\u2019ve spoken throughout Black Quantum Futurism\u2019s existence about how time can be oppressive. With each workshop and each residency, we\u2019re learning how to better trouble that\u2014the reality of working within all of these different time scenarios or realities, these temporal zones.<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> The CERN project is looking at this thing called CPT: change, parity, and time-reversal, which is a physics principle. CPT also refers to \u201cColored People\u2019s Time,\u201d and so we\u2019re going to be studying these different scales of time within physics, and learning how quantum physicists view time, and have that inform and connect with the Time Zone Protocol project, where we want to literally re-write these protocols of time. It\u2019ll inform every aspect of the work that we do as Black Quantum Futurism.<\/p>\n

JvH:<\/strong> When you speak of these protocols, CPT and Colored People\u2019s Time, but also about the quantum theories, is that, again, it\u2019s about stretching how we want to be in time, and asking what are the ways that we relate to each other and to our direct environments in time\u2014how communities and people can be in time together. I think through your work, but also through the journey of your work, there is a lot of practicing this, and constantly taking and re-taking some of these thoughts about time. Do you think that for you there is now the possibility to be in all these different residencies in your own understanding of time?<\/p>\n

RP:<\/strong> I take very seriously the work that we do as Black Quantum Futurism and the notion that time can actually be manipulated, and I use that in my everyday life in practical ways. Although I\u2019m a full-time housing attorney, I have crafted and manifested a space that I work in where I\u2019m going to be able to carve out that time\u2014where my job supports that, and where it understands that me taking time away from the job ultimately benefits my work there. A space where my work is valued in such a way that they\u2019re willing to allow me to take the time away to go pursue this residency, and they see that as important and valuable as it informs my work; they see that I\u2019m able to bring that creativity to my work as a housing attorney. I have found ways to meld them and to make it work. I really literally cross pollinate: when I\u2019m writing an op-ed about housing from the perspective of a housing attorney, I\u2019m throwing in language about futures. I\u2019m absolutely marrying these two approaches in that one space, and so now I feel like I\u2019m a part of carving out a space where it\u2019s okay to talk about Afrofuturism in lawyering. I was just invited a couple of weeks ago to be at a conference of Black law students, and the conference was about Afrofuturism\u2014it\u2019s just amazing to see that. I was a part of that, and now we have an Afrofuturist, race and technology scholar Dr. Alondra Nelson, in the president\u2019s cabinet as deputy director for science and society. We\u2019re in a world where these things are possible. It\u2019s not as hard as it was for me 10 years ago, because I\u2019ve been a part of carving a space and time where these things are reality; they\u2019re manifesting into our reality, and it doesn\u2019t look like how we think it\u2019s going to look. We\u2019ve been tricked into believing that change is this big bang thing, and that the only way we\u2019re going to know that we\u2019ve made it into an Afrofuturist world is if it\u2019s shiny and it looks like Wakanda. It\u2019s like, no! It\u2019s in the everyday! That\u2019s what our work is about: it\u2019s the everyday, it\u2019s the practical ways. People in North Philly are Afrofuturists and have thought about Afrofuturism since back in 1968 when Reverend Leon Sullivan built a space agency in the middle of North Philly. So it\u2019s the everyday, it\u2019s those things that don\u2019t get lauded, or that Disney doesn\u2019t put a billion dollars into. It\u2019s those things; that\u2019s what we value as part of our world and how we think about and view space and time. I like what you said, expanding how communities and people are in time together. I think we figured out the space thing well enough, right? And, you know, if we think a lot about history and how space and spatialization came to dominate our conversations and our thinking, it goes back to Descartes, and all those folks, and the idea of visualization: that being able to see something was a pre-dominant way of being in reality, and of how we think about reality and how we construct our reality. But time is not visual; time is very intangible. So it\u2019s harder to grasp onto that, and we want to grasp onto that\u2014we want to grasp onto those intangible things, make them tangible, and make them tools that we live and shape our realities with. Time is one of those, I guess.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The original publication of this interview \u201cPractical Futurism and the Local Otherwise: Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips) in conversation with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes\u201d appears in Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes, eds., Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice<\/em> (Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2021), republished here with permission of the authors.\u00a0Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice,<\/em>\u00a0is a reader in BAK\u2019s SUPERBASICS series and can be purchased at BAK or via\u00a0MIT Press<\/a>.<\/strong><\/h6>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Reclamations of time, geared toward community and temporally \u201clocal\u201d orientations, animate this interview with artists and activists Black Quantum Futurism (Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa), who draw from Afrofuturism, quantum physics, and \u201cAfrodiasporic traditions of space and time that are not locked into a calendar\u2019s date or a clock\u2019s time.” As discussed in the interview (which first appeared in Toward the Not Yet: Art as Public Practice<\/em>, published by BAK and MIT Press, 2021), BQF\u2019s recent and forthcoming projects directly challenge imperial and colonial standardizations of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":38136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"focus":[301],"prospection_category":[295,200,179],"class_list":["post-38531","prospection","type-prospection","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","focus-no-linear-fucking-time-nl","prospection_category-archief","prospection_category-interview-nl","prospection_category-tekst"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/prospection"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38531"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41563,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38531\/revisions\/41563"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"focus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/focus?post=38531"},{"taxonomy":"prospection_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection_category?post=38531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}