“Are you ready
to alter your destiny?”:
Chicago and Afro-Futurism
(Part 1 of 2)
By Chicago Art Magazine on Jul 02, 2011 i
This Independence Day, let us consider a different kind of liberation: Afro-Futurism.
"Xenogenesis" from SEED (The Book of Eve): The Octavia E. Butler Artist Book, 2007, Krista Franklin
From El Saturn Records to free-flowing jazz conversations with poet Henry Dumas to endless name variations of his Solar Arkestra–a play on orchestra and Noah’s ark–to true accounts of space abduction and exploration: Sonny Blountt aka Sun Ra was the real deal: prolific jazz genius, human-alien hybrid, intergalactic space traveler, reluctant prophet.
In the iconic 1974 Space is the Place, he makes plans to “teleport the whole planet through music,” with a chant “Calling Planet Earth” imploring folk to rediscover “the music of yourself.” Sun Ra believed that music was a literal teleportation device; the central control panel of his spaceship in the film is a combination organ/studio mixing board. In Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black and Other Solar Myths,[i] Kerry James Marshall writes “Sun Ra is part of a long tradition of radical, Black Liberation ideologues…a combination of real-politic and myth-o-poetics.” For musician and composer David Boykin of Sonic Healing Ministries “Sun Ra’s social and political stance was not overtly but clearly a black nationalist perspective…In free jazz, the ‘free’ is self-determination, sovereignty, being independent to be who you are. With Sun Ra it took shape in how he controlled his creative output.”
"Octavia, Dear", 2008, Krista Franklin and D. Denenge Akpem
Afro-Futurism is an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey. The creative ability to manifest action and transformation has been essential to the survival of Blacks in the Diaspora. “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)” Julian Jonker writes, “Black Americans have literally lived in an alien(-n)ation for hundreds of years. The viscerality of their abduction is equaled only by the ephemerality of the bonds which the disciplinary state has since imposed on them.” Similarly, Boykin notes that in this context, “freedom is futurist.”
Chicago’s history is rooted in liberation struggles; the concrete jungle gives rise to a fiesty, rag-tag, Mad-Maxian, blue-collar style that respects hard work and survival of the fittest. We are alchemists in this city of steel, akin to the Yoruba god Ogun, fusing metal to metal. We claim a real space traveler astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space and graduate of Chicago’s Morgan Park High School. In the tradition of grand-forefather Sun Ra who graced our lake shores with his mystical genius, Chicago “shows out” with the sanctification of conduit avery r. young’s sweet nectar sweat as he navigates between states of being in his signature Sunday Mornin’ Juke Joint performance style.
Chicago Afro-Futurism is revolutionary discopoet Khari B. levitating at the HotHouse long before will.i.am teleported from Grant Park to CNN headquarters on November 4, 2008. It is Krista Franklin’s multi-layered visual planes with giant children spinning LPs on oceans; spliced figures from antique photos become extra-terrestrial as she coaxes new stories from their faded mysteries.
Franklin’s collaged worlds entice, titillate, call out: see me, feel me, know my rare essence. One of her best-known works, SEED (The Book of Eve) is based on the speculative fiction novels of Octavia Butler. Filled with purple-tipped tentacles and voluptuous creatures, this multi-page artist’s book is an extended riff reflecting Butler’s shape-shifting ooloi, space travelers, characters who mutate past boundaries of time and form. Franklin is equally well-known for her poetry which finds its way into her visual work as full poems or stray bits of exquisitely-placed text, expanding beyond the two-dimensional, taking us on a ride whose vibration we hop on gleefully.
"Do Androids Dream of How People Are Sheep?", 2011, from Tech Noire with Stephen Flemister at Northwestern's Dittmar Gallery, Collection of Tracie D. Hall
San Francisco has the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church; Chicago has Sonic Healing Ministries. Founded in 2010 by David Boykin, SMH was launched in response to frustration with the music business. “I started playing music because of the way it made me feel and wanted to get back to that. I felt I needed a place to play my own music how I want to play it when I want to play it and control how my art is presented.”
Since 1997 Boykin has released 10 album-length recordings and performed at jazz festivals and venues from Chicago to New York, Paris to Moscow, Dakar to Accra. One project with the David Boykin Expanse was “Evidence of Life on Other Planets, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.”
At the core of SHM’s mission is an ongoing investigation of healing frequencies corresponding to colors, planets, musical vibrations. “Creative music, spiritual jazz, free jazz, avant garde jazz, experimental music, improvised music, is a sonic representation of this love…It is a reverberation of the macrocosmic sound.”
For Boykin, “‘free music’ is what it’s about, improvisation, self-expression, ritual. The purpose is spiritual with intention to go into a trance state. Everything becomes that tone. Everything that exists is the sound: it’s all sound, you are the sound, no longer separate…Especially with jazz, the more you learn, the harder it is to fall into trance. You must learn and then forget it all.” Of current investigations, “it’s about the intervals, the movement between as opposed to individual notes…to make people feel.”
The David Boykin Expanse, "UltraSheen"; designed by Rahmaan Statik Barnes
Having completed a two-month residency at Dorchester Projects, he will release a recording in Fall 2011. He broadcasts a live, all improvisational jazz session Sundays at 2 p.m. CST at http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/live/all?q=sonic+healing+ministries.
In “Bopera Theory” Amiri Baraka instructs us to “step outside the parameters of this society’s version of just about everything…Add five more senses to the five we know…Our use of the rhythm and motion and image become a social force, grasped by the people…”[ii] Afro-Futurism is rooted in history and African cosmologies, using pieces of the past, technological and analog, to build the future. These works rethink and rework notions of identity; hybridity; the alien and states of alienation; belonging, immigration, migration; and the “vessel” both corporeal and metaphoric, symbolized as a vehicle for liberation. Afro-Futurism asks: what does “Blackness” or “liberation” look like in the future, real or imagined?
We are space travelers and it’s an open invitation: come aboard and ride on the fantastic voyage.
Upcoming related events:
July 3: Sonic Healing Ministries presents: “What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass, Read by Mankwe Ndosi, Sunday, July 3 from 6-10 p.m. at 7534 S. Eberhart Avenue. (Suggested Donation: $5 to $10 or pay what you can.) Also performing: composer and saxophonist David Boykin performing some new compositions and DJ Ayana spinning Chicago soul 45’s
July 7: Award-winning speculative fiction writer Andrea Hairston gives a performance reading of her latest Chicago-specific novel Redwood and Wildfire with musician Pan Morrigan at Women and Children First at 7:30 p.m.
July 8-10: THINK Galacticon Conference at Roosevelt University http://tgcon3.thinkgalactic.org/.
To read an expanded interview with space sculptor D. Denenge Akpem on Afro-Futurism, visit Post Black the Blog. Visit http://www.denenge.net and http://www.theGIANTblog.tumblr.com for updated essays and performance video.
[i] Marshall, Kerry James. “The Legend of Sun Man Continues”, Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black and Other Solar Myths co-edited by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terry Kapsalis in 2010 based on a 2006 Hyde Park Art Center symposium of the same title, p. 58.
[ii] “Baraka, Amiri. ”Bopera Theory”, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards and Victor Leo Walker II, Temple University Press, 2002.
* * * * *
“Are you ready
to alter your destiny?”:
Chicago and Afro-Futurism
(Part 2 of 2)
By Chicago Art Magazine on Jul 06, 2011 in Articles, FeaturedRead Part 1 of the article here.
George Clinton leads the chant “Swing low, sweet chariot, stop and let me ride!” Repeat the cry: “I think I see the Mothership coming!” “If you wanna ride, help me sing, come on now!”: your liberation is up to you and participation is the ticket.
Stills from "Shadow Vignettes - Odd Eye O Mumbo Jumbo," Jonathan Woods
Chicago prophet Curtis Mayfield’s train in“People Get Ready”; Sun Ra’s Solar Arkestra; George Clinton’s Mothership; “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line: these vessels of transformation rise from the Black mythos. Sun Ra’s musical ascension coincided with the inauguration of space travel; his contemporaries included young, Chicago-born Gil Scott Heron whose percussive poem“Whitey On the Moon” reflected those left in Earth’s tenements whom Ra came to rescue inSpace is the Place. “A rat done bit my sister Nell but whitey’s on the moon…”
Afro-Futurism is hot, moist, black nutrient-rich, deep in the bowels of memory and soul iterations. It lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “The central fact in Black Science Fiction…is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in Public Enemy’s phrase) Armageddon has been in effect.”[i] In Afro-Futurism, however, “everything is alive and transformed as opposed to being destroyed.”[ii] Afro-Futurism says: even “solid” matter is made of slow-moving molecules; Jesus walked on water and you can, too.
Chicago gave birth to the renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Thedocumentary “Shadow Vignettes – Odd Eye O Mumbo Jumbo” by Jonathan Woods for AACM member Edward Wilkerson Jr. features strong elements of Afro-Futurism.
AACM continues as a multi-generational collective co-led by virtuoso flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell. Her stunning Intergalactic Beings based on Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art by Black Earth Ensemble. The story unfolded like a mirage with a luminous composition and a thick, layered, enveloping, arousing, overwhelming performance. Costumes of white plastic by butoh practitioner Nicole LeGette appeared ethereal, crumpled and molded to each performer, the masterful stage lighting turning the ensemble into an otherworldly apparition, a mystical secret society to which we bore witness.
Intergalactic Beings, Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, costumes by Nicole LeGette
Filmmaker and founder of As’e Kreative GroupJonathan Woods’ most recent project isOmandi Mech 5, a new motion comic series in development featuring an African family of the future. OM5 creator Mshindo Kumba crafts brilliantly layered stories with what Woods calls “green technologies on steroids.”[iii] Executive produced by Wesley Snipes, the series is one of the first where a motion comic is created before the actual comic book is released.OM5‘s format is not style for style sake. He elaborates:
“What animé did for Japanese culture, this can do for African-centered culture. The work contains surrealist elements and is a way to explore aspects of being and living that may not exist in the English language…it’s a whole other way to tell a story…How the artist decides what is to be in motion or not in motion is up to the storyteller. With a lot of African art, the interesting thing that happens is your fingers have an immediate feel for what it must be like to touch…That’s [key to this style]: the immediate connection to the senses.”
He and Christopher Adams’ video for Public Enemy’s “Do You Wanna Go Our Way (Director’s Cut)” takes place within the treetop city of a space-floating tree planet. In chanteuse Ugochi‘s “Good Vibes” music video, the artist playfully sends out good vibrations to harmoniously balance the universe.
Still from Public Enemy's "Do You Wanna Go Our Way", Jonathan Woods and Christopher Adams
Woods characterizes Afro-Futurism as an act of freedom with holistic intent where “all points of space and time are accessible.” He references concepts explored in Malidoma Patrice Somé’sfoundational account of a shaman’s journey Of Water and the Spirit: “With our people, the way we perceive time: the past is living.”
Award-winning writer Nnedi Okorafor’s novels explore African (specifically Nigerian) mythological systems, juju, and flight, to name just a few. Okorafor’s intially devastating real-life “cyborg” experience with scoliosis, spinal surgery and re-learning to walk led her to writing during recovery. From the flying title character of Zahrah the Windseeker to the Desert Magician Legba trickster of The Shadow Speaker, Okorafor’s tales address real-world and mystical concerns, swirling past, present and future in a glorious harmattan wind where transformation is not only possible but manifest.
Intergalactic Beings, Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble, costumes by Nicole LeGette
She describes the experience of visiting an Abuja market while wearing shorts (culturally unacceptable) as “an alien wearing attire that has the ability to stun civilians senseless and knock them off their feet…[organic fantasy] has the power to make something familiar strange…blooms directly from the soil of the real. To describe myself as an actual alien in this Abuja market incident is to most clearly and honestly portray how I experienced it. To write myself as a shape-shifter in that van to the village most accurately shows just how jarring the cultural shifts were to me…For me, fantasy is the most accurate way of describing reality.”[iv]
With a title based on Patrice Lumumba’s question “Dear friends, are you afraid of death?”, the award-winning, critically acclaimed Who Fears Death will be turned into a feature film directed by Kenyan directorWanuri Kahiu.
Like Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed shape-shifter Anyanwu, Okorafor lives between worlds, the Nigeria of her parents and the America of her birth. This ability to morph between worlds, spirit to human, male to female to new forms of gender, is characteristic of the Afro-Futurist. Think Grace Jones in her 2008 “Corporate Cannibal“ video. She appears as black liquid mercury, grotesque and seductive against a driving militaristic ska beat:
“Pleased to meet you, pleased to have you on my plate
Your meat is sweet to me…I deal in the market, every man, woman and child is a target
I can’t get enough prey
Pray for meI’ll consume my consumers, with no sense of humour…”
Afro-Futurism is dred coils of rich magma-laced soil. Glorious and untamable, the afro’s existence is predicated on flow. It is that moment when every cell in your body comes alive. Afro-Futurism asks: what does the future look like? And who has the power to control it?
Upcoming related events:
July 3: Sonic Healing Ministries presents: “What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass, Read by Mankwe Ndosi, Sunday, July 3 from 6-10 p.m. at 7534 S. Eberhart Avenue. (Suggested Donation: $5 to $10 or pay what you can.) Also performing: composer and saxophonist David Boykin performing some new compositions and DJ Ayana spinning Chicago soul 45’s
July 7: Award-winning speculative fiction writer Andrea Hairston gives a performance reading of her latest Chicago-specific novel Redwood and Wildfire with musician Pan Morrigan at Women and Children First at 7:30 p.m.
July 8-10: THINK Galacticon Conference at Roosevelt University http://tgcon3.thinkgalactic.org/.
To read an expanded interview with space sculptor D. Denenge Akpem on Afro-Futurism, visit Post Black the Blog. Visit http://www.denenge.net and http://www.theGIANTblog.tumblr.com for updated essays and performance video.
[i] Jonker, Julian. “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)”
[ii] Quote from interview with Jonathan Woods, June 2011
[iii]Quote from interview with Jonathan Woods, June 2011
[iv] Okorafor, Nnedi. “Organic fantasy” from The Black Imagination, Science Fiction and the Speculative, published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal, edited by Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman
