“Being an interdisciplinary artist is what made my way of working as a curator in this programming series interdisciplinary in nature. In the real world we experience things in immersive multisensory ways. So, I crave that kind of experience when I’m going to galleries, and I wanted to share that kind of experience with others through this program,” says Kemi Craig – guest curator for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Blueprints for the Afrofuture programming series – on a recent episode of the AGGV’s #WIP Podcast! Subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more about Kemi’s yearlong programming series that built on the work of artist Denyse Thomasos, whose paintings speak to the experience of the African diaspora (and were previously on view from December 2021 to March 2022).
In this episode of the AGGV’s #WIP Podcast, Kemi shares that “…part of the reason I was so inspired to engage with this idea of the Afrofuture – and there’s more than one future, it’s important to note that futurisms refers to a plurality of experiences – is because that notion of specifically Afrofuturism is empowering. Imagining Blackness as being embedded in the future. I find it really exciting that with futurisms you get to think outside of what already is and create something new. So I’m really drawn to things like speculative narrative, Science Fiction and fantasy, because they allow you to take your experience and create this whole other world. I had this History Professor, Dr Georgia Sitara, and she works a lot around anti-Racism and anti-Semitism, and I remember her saying to us, something along the lines of, ‘We’re here, and we’re doing this activism and trying to end these things that are problematic, but if you don’t have the ability to imagine a new world and what that might look like, then what are you moving towards? It’s one thing to take something apart, but you need to be able to create what you’re moving towards.’ So that was why I really wanted to focus on Afrofuturism. Also one of the things that I find unique with Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurities is that there is this honoring and respect and understanding of the knowledge of our ancestors, and that is brought into the future. And also this understanding of time not happening in a linear sense, but time almost being collapsed or folded in on itself, and you’re experiencing past present future simultaneously. So I’m really drawn to artists that also promote and amplify these ideas.”
Learn more about Blueprints for the Afrofuture, and the art/offerings created by Charles Campbell, Justine Chambers, Joshua Ngenda, Angie Riley, DJ Nova Jade, DJ Ayaverse, DJ Njoki Njoki, Ruby Smith Díaz, and Hidden Variable Sound Collective, by checking out the full episode on the AGGV’s #WIP Podcast!
