Black Quantum Futurism

Carousel (triptych no.1) is an experimental stop-motion animation made with paper sculptures about collective and personal memories and cycles of destruction and construction. In it, time speeds up and slows down, buildings grow and disappear, all the while, Janus, the Greek god of transitions and time keeps spinning on axis. This triptych of animations are fragments of a larger film in progress called Carousel.

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Bio:

Amy Lee Ketchum is an artist and animator based between Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Her stop-animated works combine elements of drawing and sculpture with her interest in dance and mythology. She holds a double Bachelors in Architecture and Art from the University of California, Berkeley and a Masters of Fine Arts in Animation from the University of Southern California.  Her film Two Ghosts (2013), was a National Finalist for the Student Academy Awards and has screened internationally. Recently, her collaboration with a team of colleagues, Fired Up (2017), was featured in the Atlantic and has begun touring at festivals including the Ottawa Animation Festival. In addition to independent filmmaking, she has directed commissions, including a short animated documentary for KCET’s program, Lost LA. She is currently working on an experimental stop-animation using paper sculptures and teaching animation at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

This installation is meditation on light, deflection, reflection, infinite darkness, the boundaries and coexistence between the living and the dead.

The Dragon :

is freedom

is magic

is protection

Water is Life

Light is Life

Light moves faster than Life

separating the living from the dead

what are our eyeballs capable of seeing?

what has society taught us to be able to see?

For my grandmother Baba

golden ornamentation

garden reincarnation

candles for you

and for Our Mother

the Sea Shell calls to me

in the sound of sea foam

black mermaid,

For the Fertile Divine

feminine of age old past

bloom and renergate

still thriving

in toxic bionic

dystopian fantasy wasteland

to be crumbled by her power

of the sky

of the ocean

of the vegetation

of our inevitable deaths,

violent and lungcrushing

the failure of body and justice

we transit from light to Darkness,

the structures of the universe

will pass me through the wormhole

as a beam of light.

BIO

Angie Holiday is from Oakland, California. They studied Filmmaking and Visual Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, el Institio Superior del Arte, and the Autonomous University of Social Movements in La Habana, Cuba. They identify strongly with bats, dragons and mountain lions. She is a flower child of the ocean, oak and redwood trees. Nightcreature, I am not afraid of the darkness but i do love the light. My mind thinks about decolonization of the land, purification of the soil with plants.

MOTHER: winds, wounds and tides of mama black widow (short film)

to survive now: for brown bleeders apothecary (Installation)

i remember/pay us (photograph)

we remember/pay us (photograph)

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Blache Marie reaches to embody the black widow (and other divine feminine and masculine archetypes), surviving long enough to become a knowledge keeper, storyweaver and transforming the energy of enemy into sustenance. Apprenticing with celestial bodies, elements, archetypes, plant allies and ancestors, Marie seeks connections—connections between themself and others; between themself and moments of nonlinear time; between presence and absence. Using a ritual practice similar to Betye Saar and Joy KMT, they build ceremonial healing spaces inspired by their memories and visceral emotional experience, while examining the historical context related to their blackness, being assigned female at birth, and being raised in the Midwest. The historical context of their work is in dialogue with the research of Isabel Wilkerson and Kara Walker.  Through their work they experience many deaths and rebirths, which invite the viewer into their internal conflict, thereby eliciting an emotional response that forms a new connection.

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Bio:

blache marie is poet, herbalist, graphic designer, interdisciplinary research-based artist, healer, and deathwife (a term birthed by Joy KMT). They are a co-founder of for brown bleeders, an earth-connected poc (people of color) organizing collective and the creator of for brown bleeders book series. They were raised in suburban midwest, and now travel paths of the “great” (forced) migration, embracing nomadic living. Blache’s practice offers lovingly crafted strategies to heal, move through abuse, release excess and begin again.

Blache, pronounced Blake because they heal black aches, has a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Cornell University. They continue to study with herbalist Amanda David, Dr. Geryll A. Robinson (soulshiftingretreats.com), elder Sakara Kemilla, plant allies and ancestors to support their own healing. They have a long personal history with abuse and use plant medicine, energetic healing and ritual to mend their wounds. Their work draws from several healing traditions including herbalism, Southern Folk Medicine, Pachakuti Mesa (Peruvian shamanism), curanderismo, reiki, and rootwork. They continue to travel throughout the Americas to learn directly from their teachers.

Utilizing physics, philosophy and identity, my work assembles a material point of view for a future. This future is contested in time and space; it shifts between abstracting racial constructs and recalling the late modernist imagination. I equate the black body to be its own ontological dense matter. Blackness is a signifier for the ultimately present, deep and dark expanse that is space.  I create future-hybrid-objects, which unify digital processes with found materials. They represent my belief that interacting with matter in the universe is a fundamental materialist intervention. When I consider physics, I understand that walls and limitations can finally collapse into time and space. Material and atoms vibrate with the urgency transposed into them by our ancestors.  This future– has materialized and will continue to expand with the universe. 

Bio:

Darian is a conceptual artist from Chicago, IL. He is currently a MFA Candidate in the upstate New York region at SUNY-Albany. After moving from the Midwest to the Northeast part of US, Darian began to combine his print based work, which explored physics, philosophy and outer space with wider conceptual ideas about time and space. Eventually discovering the close connection to Afrofuturism last year, his research and ideas from the past have naturally developed into a larger artistic framework.  

Three days before her wedding, my once upon a time lover found out she has a brain aneurism. A week after the wedding she found out she has to undergo a procedure to get the aneurism removed. This project aims to hold space for time and archive time through audio/visual media. Through a series of mash-up audio/visuals, I will document how she is conceptualizing time until her surgery on July 13 at 6:50 am. Given her current circumstance, has her concept of time shifted or changed? What are her love memories? What is she remembering? How do these memories lend themselves as tools of resistance in the Black Liberation struggle?

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Bio:

dash is a black queer trans abolitionist who uses Hip-Hop as their soundtrack toward Freedom Dreams. Self-proclaimed military brat, they grew up as a nomad and is still in search of home. They received their MA in History from North Carolina Central University and is also currently a PhD candidate in the African Studies department at Howard University and an MFA candidate in Curatorial Practice at Maryland Institute College of Art. Their aim is to further the human rights discourse of black LGBTQIA+ globally through visual art and curatorial practice. Believing in the importance and power of Sankofa, they also serve as an adjunct history instructor at Prince George’s Community College, teaching African-American History and Latin American History.

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In 2016, reports of unknown structures surfaced in Madison, ME and Philadelphia, PA. Attaching themselves to existing architecture, these forms grew rapidly, constructing their own walls and ceilings. These spaces, deemed “portals”, were for people of color ready to discover their true autonomy. Folks, skeptical at first, gave it a shot. The portals opened them to a cosmic landscape called Blockadia. Formed from remains of people, places and ideas, Blockadia hovers over the Caribbean. It molds itself in the cosmos with the intention of serving the needs and desires of people of color living throughout the universe. The main inhabitants, Pollinators, are ex-Earthlings who left in pursuit of an autonomous place. After witnessing the death of Michael Brown, Blockadia opened in solidarity, becoming an intergalactic refuge for people of color. In 2017, individuals throughout the Philadelphia area discovered new....abilities; super strength, telekinesis, teleportation, and sudden fluency in black magic, to name a few. Many of the individuals did not know each other or have much in common, except for the fact that they were all people of color. Although, each person did have dreams or memories of pink and black goo, diamond-shaped stars and a lot of people dressed like ninjas or zapatistas. Could these people be connected to the mysterious structures?

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Bio:

Josh Graupera is a Philadelphia-based artist and activist. Born in Lancaster, PA, he graduated from Millersville University with a BFA in Painting in 2014. He has participated in residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Media Mobilizing Project, Second State Press, Chautauqua School of Art, Haystack School of Crafts, the New York Studio School, as well as the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s Apprentice Training Program. He is currently an Arts and Media organizer with Stadium Stompers, a group of community residents and students fighting Temple University’s plans to build a football stadium in a residential neighborhood. He has worked as an educator with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, ArtWell and the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

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Two interdimensional travelers are planting flora in the garden of the Googleplex building in Silicon Valley. The ritual takes place in virtual reality, allowing them to trespass into a corporate, privatized environment that embodies a search engine. While Google claims accessibility to all human knowledge in virtual space, the two figures are glitching through the cracks of this mental geography, in order to introduce unknown species into its actual garden. The sound consists of adaptive biofeedback of the plants to their environment, touch and water.

Bio:

Judith Sönnicken (*1981, Germany) is a dimensional athlete, future ancient and chthonic collaborator. She is strolling through history, quantum physics and dreams, assembling carbon-based notions of consciousness within the fabric of non - euclidean
space/time. Judith travels light, and so her 4D matrixes consist of sculpture.zip’s, imagery, sound, writing, rituals and magic capes. After graduating with an MFA in Fine Arts at UdK Berlin in 2010, her work has been shown at Museu Geológico de Portugal / Lisbon PT, Green Art Gallery / Dubai UAE, Spinnerei Leipzig DE , Wiensowski & Harbord /Berlin DE, Autocenter Berlin DE, Bourouina Gallery / Berlin DE, Lisi Hämmerle Gallery / Bregenz AT, Klondike/Institute of Art and Culture / Dawson City, Yukon CAN, The Institute of Jamais Vu / London UK, Cirrus gallery /Los Angeles US and the The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?) 11th Gwangju Biennial / Gwangju KR. 

judithsonnicken.com

Charles Bowden was a South Western writer and journalist who spent his career searching out the interconnections between humans and nature in the Sonoran Desert and Mexican American borderlands. He wrote of the war on "illegal" immigrants, drug trafficking, murder culture, and of the ecology and natural history serving as the backdrop to this human drama. Charles Bowden once sat for a full day beneath a creosote bush- an abundant desert shrub with medicinal properties. In watching this plant, he was able to discern something more about the conditions- both social and natural- around it. I had the opportunity to spend time in this same desert, and in homage to Bowden and his work, sat for one full day beneath a creosote bush, tracing its shadow as light passed, creeping spindle-like across the paper into the hot sand. This work, for me, speaks of the ability of physical objects-- here, a living plant-- to embody time and space, and to breath this history toward us when given appropriate attention and perhaps devotion. 

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Bio:

Kaitlin Pomerantz is a visual artist and educator based in Philadelphia. Her interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between humans and nature, landscape and land use, and themes of history, vacancy, and loss. Pomerantz has recently participated in series of place-based residencies including Land Arts of the American West (Texas and South West), Cabin Time (Sierra Nevadas) and Lugo Land (Lugo, Italy). Pomerantz has most recently shown work at Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Little Berlin, Philadelphia; Texas Tech Museum, Lubbock, TX; and Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia. She will have work in upcoming shows at Sierra Nevada College, NV, and the Huntington Library, CA. Pomerantz is co-facilitator of the botanical arts project, WE THE WEEDS, and an editor at Title Magazine.

Satellite is a flythrough of a rendered imaginary universe where the viewer experiences time, but the rendered world does not. It is a dynamic synthetic system where time and space warp through the lens of the viewer. Formally, it references the early virtual reality of screen savers and 3D models. As the point of view moves in, out, and over the peaks and valleys of the rendering, there is a slippage between object and viewer as satellite orbiting one another.

Bio:

Keith Lemley is a sculptor and installation artist who creates immersive environments of objects and light. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. Lemley’s work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Mixed Greens (NYC); The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH); 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA); The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN); the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI); Summerhall (Edinburgh, United Kingdom); Smith Center for the Arts (Providence, RI); and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (Pittsburgh, PA). Group exhibition venues include the Museum of Modern Art (NYC); Family Business (NYC); Dowd Gallery (Cortland, NY); Glazenhuis National Museum (Lommel, Belgium); Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA); The Art Museum at the State University of New York at Potsdam,and the Dishman Art Museum (Beaumont, TX). He upcoming exhibition at LMAK Gallery (NYC) in 2018.

Be Here Wow is an experiment in transmedia meditation. Reaching across the globe, crowd-sourced meditations form a tapestry of voices that highlight our collective interdependence. By breaking meditation practice away from gurus and experts and creating a platform for people to share a spiritual pep talk with one another, we hope to inspire and create new futures together. We will blend light and sound to redefine time and space within an immersive mobile installation. If so inspired, guests are welcome to record their own guided meditations. The project will be available as on online interactive
website following the show. From serving Hot Tea to throwing light on dark spaces, the trike is a constantly evolving modular vessel for random encounters and curated experiences. With the kickstand down, our work explores the possibilities and potentialities of mobile experiences to require a pause from our fast moving and transient world.

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Bio:

Laura Deutch is a Philadelphia-based artist, educator, and cultural organizer committed to using media as a tool for social justice, creative expression and community building. Her projects traverse digital and analog mediums to investigate the relationships between people, places and their stories.  Her work has been showcased on television, at festivals and in galleries throughout the country. She currently works as the Education and Production Director at PhillyCAM, and previously directed the Philadelphia Youth Media Collaborative.  She serves on the board of Termite TV, and holds an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University.

www.crackingopen.org

Katya Gorker is a Moscow-born, Philadelphia-based artist and filmmaker working on a feature length documentary about mushroom foraging among the Russian diaspora. She has been collecting oral histories and shooting interviews, all the while foraging herself and poking around biology labs. Her interests in film range from the immediacy of digital media’s impact on time and collective memory to personal ethnography and the shifting boundaries of cultural identity. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Production and Studies at Chestnut Hill College.

The Resistance Time Portal is a mixed-media installation project where viewers enter a futuristic video communications booth and with an augmented reality interface gain access to “hidden” revolutionary messages transmitted by a collective of underground resistance workers from a near-future, dystopian West Philadelphia.

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Bio:

M. Asli Dukan is an independent media maker who embraces the futuristic, fantastic and imaginary genres of speculative fiction (SF) as a way to explore the possibilities of social transformation in society. She has written, produced and directed numerous short SF films that have screened at festivals across the country from New York City to Austin, Texas to Seattle, Washington. She has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including most recently the Leeway Transformation Award (2016). In 2016, she also had the honor of being named an NBPC 360 Fellow with the National Black Programming Consortium in New York. She holds an MFA in Media and Communication Arts from the City College of New York and is the founder of Mizan Media Productions where she has produced her own films, as well as numerous projects for other artists and organizations. She is currently in post-production on two feature length projects, Invisible Universe, a documentary about Black people in the genres of speculative fiction and Songs for Nina, a music and travel documentary following the “Daughters of Nina” orchestra on their French tour as they pay homage to the late singer/pianist, Nina Simone. Her next projects are the SF web series, Resistance and the anthology horror film, Skin Folk, based on the book by the award winning SF writer, Nalo Hopkinson.

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“black girl on the internet” is a visual projection that documents a coming of age that happened online. In the vein of Afrofuturism, it looks to the internet and associated technologies as utopian, helping to build black queer spaces that are worlds away from the violence too often experienced “irl.” The installation shifts temporally through the 2000’s, taking up an entire decade through a combination of screenshots, collage, and text, all to archive an online coming of age, black queer love, desire, and affect in the digital realm. Among other digital artifacts, the project touches on: angsty iMessage screenshots, the politics of natural hair video tutorials on Youtube, as well as anecdotes on meeting and loving other queer folks online. black girl on the internet has been published as a visual collection in GUTS magazine, and has screened at various art spaces- most recently at Black Futures Now (a Toronto-based collective).

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Bio:

Drawing from black feminist thought and queer studies, I use visual art and writing to examine social and collective memories of colonialism, racial formation, and its varied entanglements with queerness. I can be reached through Instagram, as @blacksailorscout.

Endangered! The Interwoven World of Toxic Creatures makes a critical parody of nature and ethnographic documentaries, in order to think through theories of affect and assemblage by using relationality and associative thinking as methods to connect the relationship between economic disaster and ecological disaster through montage. Juxtaposing original, found and archival footage that skip like flipping through channels on an old TV, the video intends to offer the deterritorialization of desire–in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense of de-Oedipalizing sexuality–as a necessary solution to, or after-effect of, the toxic pollution and capitalism that have created a destroyed world. 

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Bio:

nadahada is the collaboration between Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw and María Paz Valenzuela. It serendipitously emerged from an undergraduate class in 2014 at The New School in NYC. Their work pieces together a trans-feminist, queer migrant eco-collage through an interdisciplinary process that performs non-surgical forms of cultural castration with digital technologies, trash, and yarn. To encounter worlds within worlds, they work in a multitude of mediums, including text, performance, video, sound, collage, interactive creatures and an-architecture, with the intention of queering power structures and rupturing established systems through material and virtual fragmentation and (re)assemblage.  They have shared work in many venues, including Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL, The Church of Fun in Los Angeles, CA, and The Tarot Society and Parsons School of Design in NYC. They were also 2016 participants at Residencia Corazón in La Plata, Argentina.

http://nadahada.com

Palestinians are being forced out of their homes everyday. The largest exodus, what Palestinians call Nakba or catastrophe, occurred on May 15, 1948, 3 years after my father was born on William Stanton Street. William Stanton was a British colonel of the British Mandate in Palestine. Today, the street is called Shivat Tsiyon Street, the street of Liberation. ‘One colonial power made way to another – what liberation?’ grandma asks. Today, Palestinian refugees, my family included, are denied their Right to Return. My only access to my grandmother’s land is Google maps street view. Sometimes I wonder how grandma would’ve reacted if I would’ve shown her 7aifa on Street View, which is today the only way I can see Palestine.

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Bio:

Razan AlSalah is a Lebanese-Palestinian media artist living and working between Beirut, Philadelphia and New York. Her work formally aligns body, image, object/place particularly using visual perspective to create a sensorial (dis)connection between different times, places and scales. She is a 3-year Fulbright scholarship recipient and MFA graduate in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Her thesis show "i am also We" was first shown in a solo exhibition in New York City at the Flux Factory gallery. TIMEBOX Beirut, a public art installation, is in the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum for modern art in Beirut. Other installations and films have exhibited in Dubai, Philadelphia, Seattle, DC and New York.

Black existence is restraint. A mouth propped open is a gesture undone; words that can not be articulated. It is the expression of black thought that bends time, moving through waters, building sediment and sentiment at the banks of the Atlantic ocean. "Transatlantic Adam" is a silent digital performance piece that articulates the fluidity and passage of time within the frame of ontological blackness.

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Redeem Pettaway is a multimedia artist studying the visual language of spacetime by methods of care and digital intercession. Their practice spans performative gesture, printmaking, and video through the lens of blackness and spirituality. Redeem is a recent recipient of the New Hive Grant, Privacy, Surveillance and Prison Reform. Their work has been shown at  the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN). Echo Park Film Center (LA),  Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Seoul, South Korea), Compliance Division (Portland), Endless Editions Biennial (New York City, NY), Scrolldiving.pro, and Space Gallery (Jacksonville, FL).  Currently, their work is on display at the Cynthia & Walter R. Graham, Jr., M.D. Student Art Gallery at the University of North Florida.

Two spirits hobbled by the quick, but slow change, of the island of Trinidad converting over to the internet. Kho and Nsu, can use modern day technology; to teleport and time travel. Spreading prosperity, energy and health; are some of the gifts they bestow to melanated islanders. Over the years, they had became lazy, and didn't adapt to the internet. And are now, having issues using there gifts. Using operating vehicles or weather air pressures, to travel. They are forced to interact with other spirits.  They run into a "Moko Jumbie" a spirit who can see ahead, and avoid evil because of its height. Who reminds them, they have to keep evolving , to keep moving. Adapt a interdisciplinary lifestyle.

Satellite Spirits is a art piece in collaboration with and Robert A Young from the 'The Cloth'.

Surplus Persons is an interactive narrative / DIY game inspired by the real life stories of Chip Chan, a person who has maintained a livestream on different channels documenting their persecution by law enforcement and the deterioration of their health This piece is also inspired by the life and death of Korryn Gaines, who was killed by law enforcement while embracing her young son. The Surplus Person is a mysterious online figure who resides within the liminal space/time that disposable bodies inhabit today as well as throughout the history of global colonial power. This game lives in solidarity with unpersons such as youth living in foster care, incarcerated community members, people living without documentation, people without stable addresses, people living with financial debt and/or a lack of capital, people living with documented mental 'illnesses,' and other persons deemed unnecessary/dangerous/disposable to Western power structures. Players will surveil the Surplus Person, uncover the mysteries of this person's existence, and ultimately interrogate their own relationship to Surplus Persons in the past, present, and future.

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Bio:

R. Cutlass Mashramani is a Philly-based sci-fi writer and co-founder of Metropolarity, a local sci-fi and action collective. Her work concerns the experiences of people who are subject to institutionalization and dehumanization. In another life she works with young people facing housing insecurity to advocate for equal access to safe and stable living conditions. Her work can be found in Metropolarity's debut collection, Style of Attack Report.

Marcelline Mandeng is a Cameroonian-born artist using their body as a primary medium and subject alongside video, sound and sculpture to create ephemeral installations artworks. With a strong belief in community engagement, their work questions the socio-political landscape that informs the experiences of a naturalized citizen living at the intersections of blackness and gender non-conformity/variance, selfhood as a form of myth building and spiritual healing as a way to cope with trauma. They received their BFA from the Maryland Institute college of art in 2015 and have exhibited works at Mercer Union in Toronto, Company Gallery in Manhattan, No Nations Art Gallery In Chicago, NADA at Art Basel Miami and MoMA Ps1 just to name a few.

Oji is a Nigerian born photographer/ videographer who explores visual art through a blend of street scenes and a touch of magical realism. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children and uses the city to create worlds shrouded in mystery and transformed by a futurist aesthetic.

Based on a lifetime of sky gazing, the series, Heavenly Bodies, is autobiographical in nature. The paintings are depictions of the skies above very specific times and places (down to the minute and latitudinal/longitudinal point) in my life. These are the moments which appear in my tales and exist within the psychic landscape from which I pull visually time and time again. A major theme addressed in this series, is the fleeting nature of both time and space. Life, like a seemingly steady flame, is actually a series of infinitely minute moments arising and passing away, then arising and passing away again. In this way, these works are also about deaths, both small and great. The death of a moment. The death of a loved one. All leading to the inevitability of our own deaths.

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Bio:

Risha Rox is a Los Angeles and New York City based interdisciplinary artist working in the mediums of painting, live art, performance, installation and sculpture. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 with a major in African Diaspora Studies, she began to develop her artistic practice in the rich black loam of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Risha is a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College. Deeply informed by her heritage as both a multigenerational Black Los Angelina and a first generation Jamaican American of East Indian descent, her autoethnographic practice seeks to redefine commonly held notions regarding the human body, particularly the Black body.

To what extent can a two dimensional creation shape our existence? As one envisions reshaping the paradigm and experiences of time and space, what is it that they actually envision? Is it tangible? Is it of matter? Are the human senses stimulated? How about one’s emotions? Will we bring along the same beliefs and cosmologies that perhaps some are running from? 

For those who work at dismantling the masters clock work , as well as for those who scatter to uphold it, there's always a visual component accompanying the manifestation of the vision. That component usually winds up being the first thing or most accessible way in which the audience judges that visionaries theories as appropriate to endeavor further into or not. (Ex. Movies, book covers, logos, home decor, etc). Visuals bare Induced when one hears of time travel, and I would like to create art that can add to that conversation. 

Do we see people when we bring up time travel what do they look like?

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Bio:

Sydney Cain, also known as Sage Stargate, is a visual artist born and raised in San Francisco, Ca. Her work has been a reflection of an unseen reality we all live in. Her medium of choice is graphite on paper. Her work focuses on the everlasting, and sometimes suppressed, spirit of self. as a descendant of the African diaspora while growing up in the “Information Age”. Through her art, organic elements resurface lost and stolen myths of the ancients and futurists. She believes artist are provided to assist us in dismantling the disharmonious colonial cosmograms that have attempted to confine our consciousness. She hopes that her work inspires others to create new realms of their own.

"Oil, Bananas, Prisons" utilizes traditional Persian textiles, photo transfer imagery and video projection mapping to weave to together historical points in space and time from Iran to Guatemala to immigrant detention centers in the US. The hand sewn tapestry is a small constellation of historic images interspersed with spots of video projection of reworked archival footage along with an ambient soundscape, bordered by traditional Persian textile patterns. The piece makes connections between the US overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran--the first CIA coup--and it was then used as a model to destabilize dozens of other countries that had been gaining economic and cultural independence. These seemingly randomly interspersed moments in space and time are all linked in creating this current political moment; this piece visually captures and explores the webs of time and history in creating current political realities.

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Bio:

Sara Zia Ebrahimi is a curator of film, visual art and new media and for over a decade has produced film screenings and exhibits in the Philadelphia area. An MFA graduate of Temple University, her own short films have screened internationally and been awarded grants from Chicken & Egg Pictures, Rooftop Films and the Leeway Foundation. Her recent work includes Bailout, a web series which she wrote and directed, The FBI Blew Up My Ice Skates, an animated short film co-directed with Lindsey Martin, and she is currently working as a producer on M. Asli Dukan’s dystopian near-future web series, Resistance: the battle of philadelphia. By day she is the Program Director at the Leeway Foundation which supports women, trans and gender non-conforming artists who are using their art as a tool for social change. 

Gralin Hughes (aka television sky) is a Philadelphia based interdisciplinary artist specializing in immersive experience design through set design, VJing and video projection mapping. His recent work includes collaborations with Philadelphia visual artists and musicians such as Michelle Angela Ortiz, The Philadelphia Jazz Project, and Alex Shaw/The Mandinga Experiment. Gralin holds a Masters Degree in Museum Exhibition Planning and Design from the University of the Arts and is interested in creating collaborations between creatives, museums and schools. 

A Love Letter is a 13-minute Afrofuturist short film and ode to the ancestors from Chicago residents.  Synergizing dance styles through the surreal, this short demonstrates that rhythm bridges all times and spaces. 

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Bio

Ytasha L. Womack is an author, filmmaker, dancer and Afrofuturist. Her critically acclaimed book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture is a leading primer and featured in University’s around the world. Other books includeBeats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love & Hate About Hip Hop, Post Black, and The Rayla 2212 sci fi series. Her films include Couples Night (screenwriter), The Engagement (director) and the upcoming Afrofuturist feature film Bar Star City.  A Chicago native, she tours the world championing Afrofuturism and the use of the imagination.

In a time where people cannot walk anymore, a frustrated podiatrist decides to leave with a series of instructions.

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Bio:

My name is Yuka and I go by Euca. I am living and working in Southern California, originally from New York. I am an artist with scientific background and create works that blend the two. Experiments in my storytelling often become nonlinear works which I present as antitheses to current trends in cinema. 

Grounded While Walls Fall profiles practices of resilience and spiritual grounding among organizers, cultural workers, and movement builders in Greater Philadelphia. Documentary portraits orbit a central question, “What practices keep you grounded in your work for social change?” to explore spirituality, care of self and community, and inner power at the grassroots.To be “grounded” can mean awareness of self and community, connection to ancestors and descendants, access to spiritual wisdom, emotional intelligence, centeredness in the body, feeling, and sensation, and connecting to one’s own agency and power. Told from the perspective of a post-revolutionary archivist, the film imagines these practices as seeds of profound transformation planted in a time of transition. This film series is part of and made possible by Philadelphia Assembled, a city-wide project initiated by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and stakeholders across the city.

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Bio:

Zein Nakhoda (he/him) is a community media maker and social justice organizer who has lived and worked in Philadelphia for four years. Zein has made media with Scribe Video Center, Media Mobilizing Project, and independently. He’s in current political community with Training for Change, LeftRoots, and the Maypop Collective. He made Grounded While Walls Fall as a love poem to organizers and cultural workers working tirelessly to defend community and transform our ways of life toward equity, justice, and compassion. In the work, he aims to reflect and channel grassroots spirituality in its many forms. The excerpt features acting and voice by Rhetta Morgan, interfaith minister and convener of Ecclesia Spirit. More of Zein's work can be found here: http://zeinnakhoda.com/.