annotated press release: Afrofuturism at the CCA

Responding to the theme of the Africa In Motion Film Festival 2012 Modern Africa, Mother Tongue have guest curated a two-part artist film and video programme thematically focused on Afrofuturism.

1. Afrofuturism articulated itself as an aesthetic during the 1970s, although jazz wild man Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, science fiction writer Samuel R Delaney and The Black Panther out of The Fantastic Four were rocking it in the 1960s. It combines a determined look to the future with a sensitivity to African art and traditions and influenced hip-hop musicians like Madlib and Digible Planets. Perhaps its fullest manifestation was in George Clinton's Funkadelic/Parliament philosophy of funky aliens saving the planet.

The first event was a screening of John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History which took place at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on the 26th October. 

2. The Last Angel of History is a 45 minute 1996 documentary. George Clinton, Derrick May, Samuel R. Delany,  Juan Atkins, DJ Spooky and Goldie are interviewed and the emphasis is on music as a philosophical response to displacement.

The second installment, Afrofuturism: Revisions Towards A Place In Modernity | PART 2 stars work by Neïl Beloufa, Sanford Biggers, Rico Gatson, The Otolith Group and Philip Mallory Jones will take place at the CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow on Friday 23rd November. 

An essay on Afrofuturism, written by Mother Tongue, will be made freely available at the CCA Glasgow event.

Afrofuturism exists as a predilection for black artists, musicians, writers and critics, looking to the future in times when any future seems impossible. Perhaps because of the period in which the movement began (following the decline of the Black Power movement and demise of independence euphoria on the post-colonial African continent), the specificity of its futurism is that, rather than being naively celebratory, it instead incorporates both utopian and dystopian visions. 

It was, and is, part of a larger conscious and subconscious process of constructing counter-mythologies, a response to aspirations for a place in modernity so long denied to non-white ethnicities. This implies both its significance for the present and allows us to consider early Afrofuturist works as revisionist, inserting the black diaspora into the history of science and technology from which they had been largely omitted.


CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow | Friday 23 November | 7- 8:30pm