Join ICA for an evening of music and performance by Black Quantum Futurism (Rasheedah Phillips + Moor Mother) featuring readings by Metropolarity, soundscapes by Mind Over Matter Music Over Mind, music by jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, and free tarot readings with prophetesses. Help yourself to free takeaway Black Quantum Futurism tarot cards, and a takeaway screenprinted poster featuring a BQF chart for do-it-yourself space-time shifting. BQF will also set up an Oral Future booth, with a time and memory survey.
ICA will be open late with free art, music, food, drinks, and tours of The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.
Black Quantum Futurism is an intersectional theory and practice combining quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black and African diasporic cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space to develop temporal technologies that are more beneficial to marginalized peoples’ survival in a “high-tech” world currently dominated by oppressive, fatalistic linear time constructs.
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Defstar (Rockers!; MMGZ) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective is inspired by afrofuturism, quantum physics, and African traditions of spatial-temporal consciousness. They weave science fiction realities with African concepts of time, ritual, and sound to present innovative works that offer practical ways to escape time loops, oppression vortices, and the digital matrix. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects (ANTI-KY-THE/RA, released on Deep White Sound label), zines (NonLocality Series; Sun Ra, Synchronicity, and Superposition), and an anthology of experimental essays on space-time consciousness called Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice Vol. 1 (featured in the Unveiling Visions exhibition at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). BQF Collective is a 2016 Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. BQF has presented, exhibited, or performed at Stony Island Arts Bank, WORM! Rotterdam, Live Worms Gallery, Temple Contemporary, and more.
