Just About Time Black Quantum Futurism

Presentation by Carolina Ciuti

Video screening:

Time Travel Experiments, 2017 (9 min, 30 sec)

This video presents DIY time travel experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. Depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. The video was written and directed by BQF and shot and edited by Bob Sweeney.

Black Space Agency Training Video, 2018 (4 min, 9 sec)

Marking the 50-year anniversary of the enactment of the United States Fair Housing Act, Black Space Agency Training Video explores the chronopolitical imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements during the space race, particularly as it unfolded in North Philadelphia in 1968.  The series follows the pattern of entanglements in the fight for affordable and fair housing, displacement/space/land grabs and gentrification for a better understanding of its present-day implications on Black spatial-temporal autonomy.

All Time Is Local, 2019 (5 min)

Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this project continues BQF’s work in recovering and amplifying the historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens and the Berean Institute.

Write No History, 2021 (15 min, 34 sec)

Write No History is a short, speculative three-panel film featuring found and archival footage of the Temporal Disruptors, members of an ancient Secret Society of Black scientists, healers and  writers spread out across time in the relative past/present/future at one of their meeting lodges, the Hatfield House in Philadelphia, performing quantum time capsule burying and unearthing rituals to transport quantum time capsules containing tools, maps, clocks and codes as a technology to hack colonised timelines. Write No History is directed and produced by BQF with filmmaker Bob Sweeney. Featured Temporal Disruptors include Dominque Matti, Iresha Picot, Marcelline Mandeng, Vernon Jordan III, Angel Edwards, Vitche-Boul Ra, Sheena Clay, Camae Ayewa, Alex Farr, Rodnie King and Riot Dent.