Workshops
Please note, BQF typically only presents workshops as part of exhibitions. For a portfolio of past workshops and presentations, please visit www.afrofuturistaffair.com
Alternative Temporalities + Quantum Event Mapping
A workshop and discussion exploring the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and its contrast to indigenous African traditions of space, time, and the future. We explore alternative temporalities embodied by such cultural movements as Afrofuturism, and DIY theories as black quantum futurism, and their use as practical tools for exploring reality and shaping past and future narratives. Workshop participants will consider how to build future maps and quantum time capsules, shift cause and effect, and the interaction between timescapes and soundscapes.
Housing Futures Workshops x Visioning Sessions
Anthropology of Consciousness
Anthropology of Consciousness uses fieldsounds gathered through neighborhood walks and free style poetry to awaken past and future memories of a particular location, some of which are transformed into soundscapes and poetry zines.
DIY Time Travel + Black Grandmother Paradoxes
Using Afrofuturism and science fiction as a lens and Octavia Butler's novel Kindred as inspiration, this workshop series explores and experiments with how one can time travel with everyday tools such as memory, imagination, manipulation of language and perception, music and soundscapes, or crystals.
BQF explores the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement in their home city, specifically the neighborhood of North Philadelphia, considering especially how these issues impact on vulnerable groups, like survivors and migrants. In response, BQF offer practical strategies for countering these deprivations and equipping individuals with tools to help reverse gentrification, with the aim of creating conditions necessary for temporal autonomy and spatial agency. This session considers the role of oral futures in preserving community memories and the importance of embracing alternative temporalities when envisioning generative futures for affordable housing.
Memory, Sound, and Deactivation
Every sound is its own cause and its own event. We will create future memories with sound. We will also experience sound as an act of deactivation and redemption and create a soundspace to combat oppression.
Black Space Agency + Afrofuturist Chronopolitical Imaginaries
You Are Now Here
Maps are everywhere around us, ever present to help us navigate both public and personal geographies, or orient ourselves in communal and universal landscapes. But all maps come with an agenda - as much as maps can reveal about a place or idea, maps also have the power to hide or distort truths. This workshop will explore the utility and practice of mapping, and ways in which maps have been used to disempower people and communities, and how they can be used as a liberatory and revelatory tools. We will experiment with creating quantum maps, sound maps, housing journey maps, and memory maps.
Using AfroFuturism to Examine Reality
This workshop series explores the ways that marginalized people are represented in mainstream science fiction film and literature, and how science fiction "Afrofuturism" can be used to empower Black people and used to increase the visibility of positive images in the media and popular culture.
A talk inspired by the legacy of the Fair Housing Act, Civil Rights, Black Arts and Liberation movements, and the space race in North Philadelphia during the 1960s.