. For Counterpublic 2023, Black Quantum Futurism’s framework Space-Time Liberation (STL) explores tools and mechanisms for how residents and community members of St. Louis can reclaim home, land, space, time, and memory in their neighborhoods, and the pathways for repair and justice that are both forward-reaching and backward-reaching simultaneously—correcting the past and reshaping futures where justice and equity are fundamental and inalienable aspects of our shared reality.

The acronym CF:STL Lab takes on the triple meaning of St. Louis, Space-Time Liberation, and Slower-Than-Light. CF:STL Lab will provide a temporary convening space-time for housing advocates, artists, organizers, tenants, and other people impacted by housing insecurity and land injustice and/or interested in co-creating strategies to address its impacts. CF:STL Lab is self-activated with interactive activities and tools developed by BQF and collaborators, and activated by planned programming developed in collaboration with local community members and organizations on the topics of spatial and temporal reparations, housing futures, land justice, tenant power and collective responsibility, land sovereignty, solidarity economies, and other related topics.

With these projects, BQF invites community members to participate in the reclamation, liberation, and reparation of space and time (i.e., histories, presents, and futures) within their communities. These spaces and times are personal and communal, global and universal. The shrine, lab, and associated elements of CF:STL will be activated across the three-month exhibition as space-times for visioning and testing of strategies for community sustainability, healing, and housing and land justice.

In parallel to this project for Counterpublic 2023, Black Quantum Futurism will present SLOWER-THAN-LIGHT SHRINE: IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, a public monument and portal paying homage to liberation seekers who traversed the Underground Railroad in St. Louis, on view at La Rose Room.

The exhibition is curated by Counterpublic’s Executive Director James McAnally and is supported by The Luminary’s Artistic Director Kalaija Mallery.

Black Quantum Futurism

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, text, and sound. BQF has created a number of community-based projects, performances, experimental music projects, installations, workshops, books, short films, zines, including the Community Futures Lab, Black Woman Temporal Portal, Time Zone Protocols, and Black Time Belt projects. BQF is a 2022 Creative Capital Fellow, 2020 Arts at CERN Artists-in-Residence , 2021 Knight Art + Tech Fellow, 2018 Velocity Fund Grantee, 2018 Solitude x ZKM Web Resident, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow, 2017 Pew Fellow, and 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow. BQF has presented, exhibited, and performed at documenta fifteen, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Serpentine Gallery, Village of Art and Humanities, Manifesta 13 Biennial, ApexArt NYC, MoMA PS1, ICA London, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more.

About Counterpublic

Counterpublic is a civic exhibition that weaves contemporary art into the life of St. Louis for three months every three years in order to reimagine civic infrastructures toward generational change. Counterpublic’s second edition will run from April 15 to July 15, 2023.

Counterpublic 2023 brings together thirty new artist commissions focused on public memory and reparative futures—how our history is told, held, and healed, and how our future is envisioned collectively toward new liberated lifeways.The three-month exhibition includes active education, research, residencies, performances, publications, public projects, and commissions. www.counterpublic.org