In collaboration with Icebox Project Space Distance≠Time exhibition and performance, Black Quantum Futurism presents Time Camp 001, a two-day program and interactive installation exploring time, alternative temporalities, time travel, and temporal shifts from various frameworks, disciplines, and cultural traditions. The program includes two days of workshops, presentations, rituals, film screenings, interactive installations and special performances from local and national artists, scientists, social activists, filmmakers, writers, poets and more at Icebox Project Space.
Hashtags: #TimeCamp001 #TC001
*Workshop descriptions below
Time Camp Day 1 Welcome
11:30AM - 12:00PM
Day 1 Program and Exhibition Overview
Light Breakfast
Concurrent Workshops 1
12:00PM - 1:30PM
- Convergence x Subduction/Plates x Planes w/ Sapphire Woods
- Time Travel in the Dream State workshop/lecture w/ Nickelangelo
Break 1
1:30PM - 2:15PM
Snacks, games, Time Camp film screenings, exhibition visit, Temporal Library readings
Moor Mother sound/dream meditation (10 participants)
Concurrent Workshops 2
2:15PM - 3:45PM
- The Build 2020 Manifesto: Past, Present, Future w/ Molina Speaks
- Lasers, Portals, Entropy and Magic w/ Kendra Krueger
Break 2
3:45PM - 4:00PM
Snacks, games, exhibition visit, Moor Mother sound/dream meditation (10 participants)
Concurrent Lectures
4:00PM-4:30PM
- How the brain perceives time and what it means for your memories lecture w/ Nathan Fried
- The First Light Series: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Time Talk Back w/ Alex Harsley
Concurrent Workshops 3
4:30PM - 6PM
- Timelessness and the Child Unconscious in Poetry w/ Maggie Lily
- The Social Alchemy of Mestizaje Consciousness w/ Sheree Brown & Asia Dorsey
Special Presentations
6PM-6:45PM
- Tarot readings by OSHUN
- Performative Workshop with YATTA
Time Camp Day 2 Welcome
10/01/17
12:30 PM - 1:00PM
Day 2 Program and Exhibition Overview
Light Breakfast
Concurrent Workshops 1
10/01/17
1:00 PM-2:30PM
- Journey to KMT: Yoga as Time Travel w/ Jazmyn Burton
Workshop can accompany up to 15 people. Feel free to bring your own yoga mat.
- Dreaming Social Justice: How Dreamwork Transforms Futures w/ Sheree Brown & Asia Dorsey
Break 1
10/01/17
2:30PM - 2:45PM
Snacks, games, Time Camp film screenings, exhibition visit, Temporal Library readings
Moor Mother sound/dream meditation (10 participants)
Concurrent Workshops 2
10/01/17
2:45PM - 4:00PM
- Time Travel Through Blood and Memory w/ Blache Marie and Rose
Workshop accommodates up to 15 people only
- Tell the Story of Tomorrow, Today workshop w/ Matt Kalasky
Camp Bands Showcase
10/01/17
4:15PM - 6:00PM
Performances By:
- Solarized
- Moor Mother + Special Guests
- Interminable
Workshop presenters and
descriptions
Alex Harsley & Kendra Krueger
Film Screening + Talkback: The First Light: The Mythos of Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Dark Time
Harsley's hypnotic video takes us on a journey of unraveling. It is a parable and family history of dark matter, dark energy and ultimately dark time. The journey is through parallel dimensions, oscillating between a narrative dance of dark energy and it's illegitimate child dark matter and visions of current day dystopia filled with distraction and false urgency. The layered and 3-dimensional soundscape begins to hypnotize as the parallel realities merge and emerge from the noise. There is a sense of deprogramming. Of un-knowing. Of arriving at a new nexus of time/space story. Join us after the screening for a talk-back with the artist and his daughter, a scientist, on further unraveling the story of energy, matter and time.
Bio:
Alex Harsley is a photographer and experimental videographer, founder of Minority Photographers Inc (est 1971) and The 4th Street Photo Gallery (1973) of NYC's Lower East Side. His collection and experience continues to be a container and witness to the resonant and fractal nature of time, change and human nature. He started his career as the first black photographer for NYC's District Attorney in 1959. His gallery space remains as one of the few POC owned and operated artist spaces in the Lower East Side. He continues to serve the community as a mentor and for young artists and as a documentor of the history and lineage of photographic technology and the changing city itself.
http://www.the4thstreetphotogallery.com/alex-harsley.html
https://fith-artcollective.jimdo.com/alex-harsley-first-light-series/
Asia Dorsey and Sheree Brown
Workshop: The Social Alchemy of Mestizaje Consciousness
Engaging the alchemical processes of integrating social identities and ancestry, to transform personal and collective consciousness. Through navigating the language and processes of plant alchemy and mestizaje consciousness, we will identify and design roadmaps to the liberated future of our creation. Utilizing the concept of mestizaje as cultivated by Gloria E. Anzaldua, we will explore how the mixing of ancestry, blood, and culture has created a new race, la raza cosmica, and consequently a new consciousness. Mestizaje Consciousness gives the example and vision of rectifying and bringing together the duality/plurality of our ancestries into wholeness. The study of alchemy will be the vehicle and lens through which we experience and observe the concept of Mestizaje Consciousness.
Bio:
Asia Dorsey is a serene green love machine. She makes art of spreading the seeds of creativity and community, justice and just desserts to anyone brave enough to be themselves. She trades fertilizer with seed activists and stories of future remembrance through belly button solidarity. Currently, this bioalchemist, educator and leader of the Five Points Fermentation Co., enjoys her time working with youth and families around indigenous culinary technology. Her work is ever cultivating the partnerships needed to create a bioregional food economy rooted in the ethics of people care, land care and fair share. Formally a graduate of New York University, this Colorado wise woman, wakes up every day newly inspired by the power of everyday people to do extraordinary things. She is also a mothafu*kin mermaid.
Blache Marie & Rose of For Brown Bleeders
Workshop: Time Travel Through Blood and Memory
Our blood. Our lineage. Our life force.
Using ourselves as living libraries, we will time travel through blood memory, which carries our knowledge, our wounds, our joys and pain and our ancestors. What happens when we imagine and practice nourishing the future for brown bleeders? What happens when we remember we have always time traveled using blood memory? We are living libraries of healing methods and guardians of our knowledge. Journey with us as we tap into our blood memory and exchange knowledge and stories. We will pass around sacred objects from our travels and herbal remedies created by for brown bleeders. This space created will be a participatory circle to discuss these ideas. Limited to 15 participants, POC Only.
Bio:
Blache Marie and Rose met in 2015, at a time when they were involved with an exploitative non-profit. This non-profit made people of color feel tokenized in the “housing scholarship” program. Their first conversation was about a desire to build and live in a tiny house. From there on, their friendship grew to including deeper conversations, healing, and traveling.
For Brown Bleeders originally began as a book series which served as a method to organize the chaos that domestic violence and mental illness causes. Through working internally, artist Blache Marie was able to connect the abuse in their childhood home — as well as with mental and physical health systems — to systemic oppression. Blache and Rose shared their stories of childhood abuse with one another. For Blache, in particular, this was helpful because they were not aware that they had been abused by their parents until they had been away from them for a few years. As Blache worked on the book series, Rose and Blache had several conversations about what they need as they bleed, considering that they both experienced significantly painful periods. From these interpersonal and intrapersonal l conversations, they learned of the profound depth of bleeding and blood itself. Essentially, blood carries the histories of our ancestors as well as our own stories we sometimes wish to forget.
For Brown Bleeders is an organizing collective of earth-connected PoC, low-socioeconomic status (low-SES) artists and healers centering the experiences of black and native people in the United States. Ultimately, we organize healing spaces and create herbal remedies focused on the needs of PoC who bleed and who are moving through all forms of abuse, with an emphasis on sexual assault, domestic violence, and environmental racism.
Interminable
Performance/Workshop: Con/secuencia: diasporic fusion as time travel
African, southern Spanish, Arabic, and native American roots. Jazz, bringing together echoes of blues, ragtime -- both rooted in improvisation, afrodiaspora and swing time. Bring them together with electronic music and rock and you have the beginnings of Interminable. No song is performed the same way twice; time, chords, and musical keys move in cyclical motion. We bring all of who we are -- multifaceted identities, musical backgrounds, instruments.
Bio:
Interminable is a Philadelphia-based dyasporic space jazz project, born out of a chance encounter on the train. A week later, the band was playing its first show. These days, Interminable explores the modern diasporic experience, with covers and originals both in English and Spanish. Through their music, Interminable gives voice to socio-political themes often ignored, like displacement, migration, and identity. Interminable searches for common threads of improvisation throughout son jarocho (a regional style of music from Veracruz, México), electronic music, rock, and jazz. This innovative tapestry of sounds is expressed through the band’s unique combination of instruments: the jarana and the voice, trumpets and djembe, drumset and bass.
Since Interminable's debut in 2015, opening for nationally-renowned cumbia group, Viento Callejero, the band has amassed an impressive portfolio. The band has opened for many nationally and internationally recognized acts including Radio Jarocho, Zenén Zeferino, Mare Advertencia Lirika, DJ Precolumbian, Claudio Vega, Jarana Beat, and Gina Chavez. They have played venues from punk basement shows to The Magic Gardens. They were a featured performer in SUPER|object, a forum for emerging queer artists in Philadelphia. Recently, Interminable presented their music in Mexico, collaborating with local son jarocho musicians Anna Arismendez and Natse Rojas for performances in Puebla, Mexico City, and the biggest annual celebration of son jarocho, the Fiestas de la Candelaria in Tlacotalpan, Veracruz. They are currenty gearing up to record their debut album and will be touring in preparation for that process. Come share in their celebration of migrant sounds, cultural fusions, and musical community!
www.interminablemusic.com
Jazmyn Burton
Workshop: Journey to KMT: Yoga as Time Travel
The past is not physical it’s only information stored in your mind. When you consciously or unconsciously alter the information you’ve stored as memory, you change the past, when you change your past, you change the timeline that you are traveling on and the possibilities of the future. Using Egyptian Yoga as the catalyst, this innovate yoga and meditation class will challenge students to visualize and explore ancient Egypt through the power of imagination. Students will be become characters in myth of the Ausarian Resurrection, which predates the Judeo Christian resurrection myth, through a series of mediations and postures that align with the principal deities in the story.
Bio:
Jazmyn is a 200-hour certified, Philadelphia based yoga instructor and health and wellness writer.Over the last decade Jazmyn has immersed herself in the physical and spiritual practiced of yoga. Her classes are crafted for all levels and provide a serene, safe and welcoming space where students of all shapes, sizes, colors and backgrounds can find peace and balance while working to create a wellness regime that supports their physical, emotional and spiritual development. Visit yeyeyoga.com to learn more about Jazmyn and her classes.
Kendra Krueger
Workshop: The Magic of Uncertainty: Portals and Entropy
Portals are technologies that allow us to access alternate realities, information and energies outside of our conventional time-space. Many modern technologies such as lasers work on the same principles that are utilized in ancient practices of ceremony and ritual. We will explore the fundamentals of creating resonant systems that exists in both physical and emotional dimensions. Entropy and evolution will be relevant themes as we decolonize scientific language and the narratives that limit the possibilities of infinite uncertainty. We will engage with our own intuitive technologies that allow us to access, process and store information, matter and energy as we reclaim the science of time-space.
Bio:
Kendra Krueger is a scientist and wixard who teaches how to use science as a tool for personal liberation and discovery. She works with artists and healers to develop scientific protocols and research methods while also teaching scientists how to train and calibrate their intuitive problem solving skills. She has a bachelor and masters degree in Electrical Engineering (BS Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, MS University of Colorado Boulder) and has experience in radio astronomy, semiconductor physics, photolithography and ceramics. She is trained in facilitation, permaculture, anti-oppression, mindfulness meditation and dabbles in radio production, journalism, theater, dance and music. She is originally from New York City's Lower East Side and currently lives in the Five Points neighborhood of Denver, Colorado.
Website: www.4loveandscience.com
Maggie Lily
Timelessness and the Child Unconscious in Poetry
Through principles of Black Quantum Futurism such as retrocausality and time mapping, and the Jungian practice of Active Imagination, participants will be challenged to question concepts of linear time in relation to the “childself” as it denies access to understanding who we are and always have been. Through poetry exercises and exercises in Active Imagination, participants will write a poem or poems based upon their individual journeys into the timeless realm of the collective unconscious.
Bio:
Maggie Lily is an award-winning poet, artist, curator, and moth who has spent much of her poetic practice invested in the collective unconscious and in the mind-to-spirit connection.
Matt Kalasky
Workshop: Tell the Story of Today, Tomorrow: A Writing Workshop
We live our everyday stuck sandwiched between what has come directly before and soon to come after. But what if we could understand our present moment from a different vantage point? One that is situated in a distant time and place of our own creation?
“Imagine it’s the year 2037, tell us the story of today.”
For this writing workshop participants will create short works of autobiographical fiction that will recount the last 24 hours of their life from the perspective of an imagined future. The goal of this workshop is to give participants the power to shape their present life through the mechanics of future speculative fiction writing. This workshop will also include brief writing exercises plus readings and discussions of literary examples. No writing experience necessary. All materials will be provided.
Bio:
Matt Kalasky is a designer, critic and arts organizer living in Philadelphia. DAY TIME: He is the Education and Public Engagement Coordinator at The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design. NIGHT TIME: He is a frequent contributor to Philadelphia's Artblog. ALL THE TIME: With Mike Treffehn he is I am the One Who Knocks--Philadelphia's second-best lecture-onica soul-cialist cover jam band
Molina Speaks
Workshop: The Build 2020 Manifesto: Past, Present, Future
Build 2020 Manifesto is a People's History of the Future—a ten chapter book-on-tape cut to hip-hop and glitch beats. The project centers on three key themes: Technology, Sustainability, Humanity. Centering on the premise that the timeframe between 2010 and 2020 would dictate the next 100 to 1000 years of human future, artist Molina Speaks studied the past, then present trends, and futurist projections of artists, philosophers, tech giants, technocrats, media institutes, and corporate, banking and governmental institutions. Build 2020 Manifesto is a time capsule for humanity, and a call to action for the ancestors—US—to build the future we wish to inhabit now in the present tense. As man continues to merge with machine and people experience time at a faster pace, the message and subject matter become increasingly more relevant. Economic, political, and ecological crises fuel the paradigm of disaster capitalism, as all of humanity is forced to question what futurist survival may entail. Much of what was predicted in 2010 has come to pass as we approach the year 2020. It is time to reflect upon lessons learned, and to strategically set the stage for the futurist paradigm shifts of 2020. This requires an integration of personal, collective, cultural, spiritual, artistic, social, political, and economic approaches, and above all creativity and imagination.
Bio:
Molina Speaks is a Chicano | Indigenous | Mestizo Futurist, a living word architect, a human bridge, and an artist. He is a professor of cultural and media studies, and works with young people at all ages levels to develop their imaginations, creativity and senses of wonder about their existence. In addition to his own music and poetry, he plays with Chicano Afrobeat orchestra Pink Hawks and punk and hip-hop act Roots Rice and Beans. He cooks up magic and medicine in the kitchen, and contributes time and knowledge to various community organizations, arts collectives, and holistic health initiatives. He is the recipient of Westword’s2017 Mastermind Award.
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Moor Mother + Special Guests
Time Camp Sonic Durational
Sign up and journey through sonic dream explorations with moor mother and special guests on a personal set of headphones. Let sound be the medium for you to meditate, time travel, nap or whatever you imagine.
www.moormother.com
Nathan Fried
Lecture: How the brain perceives time and what it means for your memories
Deep within your brain, tucked under the thalamus lies a small structure that resembles a pine cone. Although bathed in darkness, it contains neurons that are sensitive to light; a third eye. An intricate system exists that takes photons of light from the retina and sends them along neuronal pathways to this little structure. In response, it slowly reduces its release of melatonin, a signaling molecule that courses through your veins to tell each and every cell whether it's day or night. This is the pineal gland and it's responsible for the most innate form of time perception – circadian rhythms.
Over the millennia, complex structures within the brain have evolved to allow time to be told on a greater range than morning and night.A network of brain regions including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia allow you to piece together memories, string words into sentences, bring a spoon full of food to your mouth; timing is vital to the complex behaviors we all take for granted. Interestingly, different emotions like fear can modulate these systems, changing the way we perceive time and fundamentally altering our behaviors. This lecture will provide you with the knowledge of how the brain perceives time and how our environments can alter that.
Bio:
Dr. Nathan Fried is an IRACDA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor at Rutgers University where he focuses his research on how the brain perceives the senses and how sensory input can alter moods. In his lab, he uses modern-day neuroscience and genetics techniques that allow him to engineer mice to "feel light" with state of the art technology called optogenetics. As a professor he teaches numerous concepts about the brain that range from how we perceive time to how addiction develops. He is also a science journalist at Harvard University.
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Nickelangelo
Workshop: Time Travel in the Dream State
Time travel is often thought of in terms of moving the physical body through time and space into other eras and realities. This workshop is an exploration beyond the physical into the metaphysical — the movement of awareness beyond the present, into the past and future, by means of dream and trance experiences, both conscious and unconscious.
Subjects include:
● historical practice of recording and making use of dream travels, with examples from
all over the world
● dreams as prophesy of future events
● dreams as an exploration of the concept of past lives
● examples of dreams as creative source of artistic and scientific ideas
● examples of my own personal experiences with time travel in the dream state
● lucid dreams, and dream symbology
● waking dreams, using dream symbology to analyze experiences while awake
● developing intuition
● entering a dreamlike state through meditation, contemplation, and hypnogogic trance
● practical tips on remembering and recording dreams
Bio:
After decades of work in the worlds of publication, interface, and advertising design -- cutting and pasting and clicking and cropping -- Nickelangelo has jumped ship into the sea of the contemporary conceptual art, and has been struggling ever since to keep his head above the waves. He has recorded and studied his dreams for the past twenty years, and considers dreamworking to be a fundamental tool anyone can use to better understand their past, present, and future lives.
Oshun
Tarot Readings
Oshun is a professional tarot reader and energy healer based in Philadelphia. Oshun has done chakra healing, mediumship, tarot therapy, candle magic, and spell work for the past 20 years. She uses tarot as a tool to help people see behind the veils and achieve their highest purpose. She is a generational bruja from a long line of root and energy workers. Her gifts and work is rooted in African Ancestral energy. Oshun invites you to enter into a place of knowing and healing. Nothing is hidden and everything can be healed
Sapphire Woods
Workshop: Convergence x Subduction // Plates x Planes
This workshop centres African notions of time and Akan perceptions of personhood. Taking as a fact that time likens to convection currents which move and shift plates beneath the surface of the Earth, so does zamani, or deeper time. My workshop challenges passive observations of one’s personal time and through directed questions and a hands-on herbal bath/tea making activity, facilitates ways of being an active and ethical time traveler. I will facilitate the reinstatement of oneself within movements and resurfacings of memory to create positive and powerful change for one’s self and community.
Bio: Sapphire Woods is a queer nerd traveling from Toronto, Canada with a purpose to facilitate knowledge and healing transfer between Black and racialized folks. Sapphire's ancestry is from the Carib Indigenous peoples of Trinidad and her family has since migrated and settled across Canada and the United States. Sapphire has been strengthening her knowledge and use of herbal and root magick for the last 3 years but has been a witch all her life. Just completing her Masters of Education, Sapphire's positive obsessions are with education for Black and racialized children through Afrofuturism and graphic novels, being a plant mom, and eating gelato.
Sheree Brown and Asia Dorsey
Workshop: Dreaming Social Justice: How Dreamwork Transforms Futures
It is through the dream space that we are able to cultivate the visionary practice. Through the visionary practice, we are able to expand the perspectives and possibilities available to us in providing solutions to tangible issues in our communities. Dreamwork is powerful in the realm of experiencing true personal agency and co-creation forces. The Mexica who practice in the Toltec lineage of dreamwork believe that anything you wish to manifest on this plane, must be first conjured up in the dream world. Through lucid dreaming, you are able to live beyond time constructs, experience
past/present/future consciousness, and tap into the shaping of collective consciousness. We will explore tangible dreamwork practices collectively, as well as drawing the connections between dreamwork and how it can affect our social justice models.
Bio:
Sheree Brown is a writer, poet, AfroMestizaFuturist, co-creator, educator, and new mother. She dances with the cosmos and writes the future of her people in her spare time. A great deal of her writing is a blend between poetry and prose, and an amalgamation of experience and dreams. She is a practicing herbalist and Spacewitch, rooted in traditional indigenous medicine of her mixed ancestry.
Solarized
Performance
Bio:
As much purveyors of afropunk in its purest form as they are burning embers wafting from the husk of '90's artpunk/emocore (think more Torches to Rome, Antioch Arrow or Swing Kids, less Earth Crisis), SOLARIZED is truly a hardcore punk band that channels the visionary praxis of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler through a noise rock/hardcore lens. The swirling, dense, brooding sound is a vessel for totemic insurrection. With their cut-n-paste, stylized approach to thermo dynamics, non-binary embodyment, and queer/POC revolution or “punk rock as alternative spirituality”, Solarized, as Maximum RocknRoll (the only punk zine that matters) put it in a review of their first demo tape, “rejects dominant structures of meaning” while creating a “radical sound of a revolution that is happening without asking permission”.
YATTA
Performance
Bio:
YATTA is a Houston-born interdisciplinary artist, digipoet, and musician currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Using incantations born of loop pedal drones, folk acoustics, and ecstatic beats, they alchemize and creolize jazz vocals w/ Krio cries to create music to lie down in. Past performances + workshops have taken place in friends' backyards, community farms, Afrofuturism conferences, The Brooklyn Museum, Powrplnt, The Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival, MOMA PS1, Issue Project Room and about 72 other places.
Psychosis & Straddling Time
In YATTA's world, music and poetry leak out of the cracks that psychosis create.
Their performance will reflect on mental illness as a reaction to oppressive environments, offering magic tips & tricks to center in our current world. Schisms simulated by sound & wholeness mimicked by poetry.
Exhibiting artists and
installations
Amy Lee Ketchum | Carousel
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.
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.
Angie Holiday | The Dragon's Den
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.
Blache Marie | Various Works
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)
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.
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.
Darian Longmire | Future-Hybrid Objects
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.
dash | Testimony
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?
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.
Josh Graupera | Blockadia
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?
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.
Judith Sönnicken | Google Gardening
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.
Kaitlin Pomerantz | Time Drawing (After Charles Bowden and the creosote bush, of Morman Mesa, Nevada)
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.
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.
Keith Lemley | Satellite
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.
Laura Deutch & Katya Gorker | Be Here Wow
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.
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.
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.
M. Asli Dukan | Resistance Time Portal
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.
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.
M. Mohamed | black girl on the internet
“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).
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.
nadahada | Endangered: The Interwoven World of Toxic Creatures
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.
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.
Razan AlSalah | Your father was born a 100 years old, and so was the Nakba سنة، زي النكبة١٠٠ابوكي خلق عمره
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.
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.
Redeem Pettaway | Transatlantic Adam
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.
Bio:
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.
Richard R. Ross | SATELLITE SPIRITS
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'.
R. Cutlass Mashramani, Marcelline Mandeng, and, Oji | Surplus Persons
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.
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.
Risha Rox | HEAVENLY BODIES
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.
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.
Sage Stargate | HeLa: How Many Times Must We Die Until We Are Allowed to Live?
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?
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.
Sara Zia Ebrahimi & Gralin Hughes | Oil, Bananas, Prisons
"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.
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.
Ytasha L. Womack | A Love Letter to the Ancestors from Chicago
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.
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.
Yuka Murakami | A Cube for Taste
In a time where people cannot walk anymore, a frustrated podiatrist decides to leave with a series of instructions.
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.
Zein Nakhoda | Grounded While Walls Fall
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.
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/.