Still image from online exhibition, May 7 - July 10, 2021.
Black Quantum Futurism:
Black Womxn Temporal Portal, 2019.
©Black Quantum Futurism
Black Quantum Futurism:
Black Womxn Temporal Portal, 2019.
©Black Quantum Futurism
Installation at ARoS Public, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (DK)
Installation photo: ©Mikkel Kaldal
Black Quantum Futurism is a collective challenging the Western linear conception of time, as it frames our reality and controls our actions. Their website Black Womxn Temporal Portal is a toolkit of Black womanist rituals and tech, trying to resist this Western temporality. The tools activate a plurality of futures wherein Black women, non-binary, and femmes can be safe and valued. Here, one can access the sub-site ANTI-KY-THE/RA, which is the name of the world’s first analogue computer. Unlike the usual story in which it is said to be constructed by a Greek astronomer around 100 BCE, the website decolonizes the history of technology by speculating in ANTI-KY-THE/RA being made by a secret society in ancient Africa as a device for time displacement.
Other decolonial techniques are presented on the website under the site Temporal Deprogramming, underlining how black people constantly have to code their bodies to adapt to spaces dictated by white culture. As a solution, the site offers a recoding of the body to collapse Western temporality. By stating that the experiment is a decoding anddeprogramming of the body, Black Quantum Futurism monstrously defines human bodies as technology challengingWestern definitions of high-tech degrading other cultures as primitive.
Ida Schyum,
cand.mag in art history