The “The Race for Space” was an essay by Duke Ellington refering to the the cold war competition over supremacy in outer space that loomed large in the cultural imagination of the time, which not only mirrored the techno-utopian ideology but also put into question the concept of race, as much as the ongoing colonial battles of distribution, ownership and access. For Sun Ra, “space was both a metaphor of exclusion and of reterritorialization, of claiming the ’outside’ as ones own, of tying together a revised and corrected past to a claimed future. Space was also a metaphor which transvalues the dominant terms so that they become aberrant, a minority position, while the terms of the outside, the beyond, the margins, become the standard.“ Space can become a place.

While in at the point of conception Afrofuturism was primarily a phenomenon of the African diaspora, in the last ten years particularly artists, writers, designers and musicians from the African continent were using Afrofuturism as both, a keyword and frame to reinvent the persistent cliche image of a continent of misery and replace it with self-defined, futuristic image production that does not cast its inhabitants only as victims.

What is the use of the concept of Afrofuturism in a wider context of contemporary art, culture and society, today? Obviously, it still challenges predominant conceptions such as: Who has the power to define technological progress, who owns the means of imagination? To pose these questions today, reconnects a possible future with a present that is characterised by a permanent crisis seems increasingly urgent in many different respects. It not only calls for a critical investigation of the actual colonisation of outer space by revisiting anti- and post-colonial theory, but at the same time it intervenes directly into the current debates about recent migration movements and has the posiblity to open up new perspectives of what is at stake. It unlinks the either charity or resentment driven liberal discourse of ‘poor refugees’ or ‘illegal aliens’ from the visionary, yet not fully graspable potential of a mass exodus.

During the past months the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (KIT) has worked on the history and impact of Afrofuturism from different angles and perspectives: exploring artificial strategies for fictional narratives, terrestrial and extra-terrestrian sounds and their non-representative potential, but also the distribution of resources from the past and the future as well as the appropriation and re-appropriation of technologies of the everyday.

As a satellite program of Meta.Morf 2016, a group of graduate students and researchers at KIT will present the results of their artistic research on Afrofuturism from March 11 to 18. The exhibition spaces of Galleri KIT will be turned into an outer space research lounge of another kind: Hosting lectures, presentations, conversations, film screenings, DJ sets, performances, live-streams. It will be remotely connected to the ‘Pan African Space Station’ — ‘a machine for travelling at the speed of thought, a probe for drilling into new levels of possibility space’, founded 2008 in Cape Town and curated by Ntone Edjabe.

The program features the work of the London based artists John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun who will install a selection of film and video pieces from the past 25 years based on two major works:

“The Last Angel of History“(1996) by John Akomfrah is ‘a 45-minute meditation on black consciousness whose dense, almost chaotic weave of images and ideas offers space travel and science fiction as metaphors for the experience of the African diaspora’.

“Hydra Decapita” (2010) by The Otolith Group is a filmic essay on the Detroit based electronic music duo Drexciya, who ‘released an influential series of recordings that imagined a fictional world system entitled Drexciya, populated by the subaquatic descendants of Africans drowned by slavers during the Middle Passage’.

Both, John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun will be present in Trondheim between March 11 and 18. The program of artist talks, lectures and presentations will take place from March 16 to 18.