This conference begins with the urgent sense that this is a time of great crisis in the world, and that the importance of a militant imagination made concrete is drastically important, as so many other tools seem to be ineffective. With this in mind we will collective- ly experiment with ways to expand the scope of the sonic to consider questions of climate futures and ctions, the anthropocene and climate violence. In what ways can sonic and haptic thinking contribute to decision making, as the framework for the Five Elements states? And, what might this practice look like on the ground and in the everyday?
This will be a week of listening.
We will consider possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dance oors and sound systems, and in outer space. To do this we combine two conversations
– afrofuturism and the anthropocene – and at their con uence we listen to Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, ctional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of
an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water and Atlantis bring back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea. This is the beginning of a method in world building in the face of and in resistance to violence.
With Drexciya as a method, we will listen and think through climate violence through techno, dub, chain gang songs, calypso and rap. We will listen to the city and the sea. We will see if/how Drexciya, an afrofuturist project coming out of Detroit, can be explored in a Senegalese context, but also consider in the context of ‘The Five Elements’ how to expand this practice outside of a performance context and into the world of decision-making. We will consider
About Ayesha
Ayesha Hameed’s work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her work has been performed or exhibited at ICA, London (2015), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014), at The Chimurenga Library at the Showroom, London (2015), Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, Oxford (2015), Edinburgh College of Art (2015), Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2015), Pavilion, Leeds in 2015 and at Homeworks Space Program, Beirut in 2016.
Her publications include contributions to
Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press 2014), We Travelled The Spaceways (Duke University Press, forth- coming 2017), Unsound/Undead (Univocal, forthcoming 2017); and books including Visual Cultures as Time Travel (with Henriette Gunkel, Sternberg, forthcoming 2018), Futures and Fictions (co-edited with Simon O’Sullivan and Henriette Gunkel, forthcoming 2017).
She is currently the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art and formerly a Research Fellow with Forensic Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London.