Quantum Afrofuturism

What is the relationship between the struggle for civil rights in the United States, transdisciplinary art, and quantum physics?

Apparently none.

Unless, of course, your name is Black Quantum Futurism, you are a collective made up of two African-American artists from Philadelphia and you have just won the Collide Prize, which gives you the chance to share your work with that developed by CERN physicists, the world's largest particle laboratory located in Switzerland, next to the French border.

"It all started in 2008, when Camae and I had our blogs and a mutual friend told us that we should get to know each other because we wrote about very similar issues: astrology, philosophy, sacred geometries, music and reflections on space and time," he says. Rasheedah Phillips, who in addition to being interested in all these issues is a housing lawyer, represents low-income people who are facing eviction processes and designs policies so that the most unprotected communities are not displaced from their homes and can project themselves into the future. Camae Ayewa, his partner - better known by the stage name

-, is a musician, poet, art curator and gender activist. Inspired by the work of Camae and other African American artists, in 2011 Rasheedah launched the initiative

in which she featured the work of a group of Afrofuturist creators. “At that time I had already started writing speculative fiction and organized science fiction readings,” he recalls, “and in 2014 Camae created the sound environment for one of those readings. That's when we started having very deep conversations about time and the idea of ​​quantum Afrofuturism came up. You could say that this was our first project as Black Quantum Futurism. "

The term Afrofuturism was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in an article published in 1994 to refer to the production of people of color in the territories of speculative fiction and science fiction. The truth is that these practices go back several decades in time. With exponents such as Sun Ra in music or Octavia E. Butler in literature, Afrofuturism explores the existence of alternative worlds in which the possibilities of people of color are expanded through technology. Psychedelic funk, alien civilizations, time travel, and futuristic utopias combine to shape the movement. "For us it's just about black people having access to the future," Rasheedah explains.“In the world we live in this has a speculative character because we are often expelled from the future. We can verify this if we look at the numerous cases of police brutality that we face every day and the high infant mortality rate that affects our community ”. “Afrofuturism for us consists of building tools that allow us to enter the future”, adds Camae, “and this can occur by making use of the ways in which traditional African culture has understood its relationship with time, a conception in which the effect can precede the cause and in which the past and the future can coexist in infinite states of possibility ”.We can verify this if we look at the numerous cases of police brutality that we face every day and the high infant mortality rate that affects our community ”. “Afrofuturism for us consists of building tools that allow us to enter the future”, adds Camae, “and this can occur by making use of the ways in which traditional African culture has understood its relationship with time, a conception in which the effect can precede the cause and in which the past and the future can coexist in infinite states of possibility ”.We can verify this if we look at the numerous cases of police brutality that we face every day and the high infant mortality rate that affects our community ”. “Afrofuturism for us consists of building tools that allow us to delve into the future,” adds Camae, “and this can occur by making use of the ways in which traditional African culture has understood its relationship with time, a conception in which the effect can precede the cause and in which the past and the future can coexist in infinite states of possibility ”.“And this can happen by making use of the ways in which traditional African culture has understood its relationship with time, a conception in which the effect can precede the cause and in which the past and the future can coexist in infinite states of possibility ”.“And this can happen by making use of the ways in which traditional African culture has understood its relationship with time, a conception in which the effect can precede the cause and in which the past and the future can coexist in infinite states of possibility ”.

Phillips and Ayewa.GENE SMIRNO V

And what does quantum theory have to do with all this? Well, one of its great fields of study is precisely time and the different ways in which it is affected by events and experience. In the western and modern tradition, time is linear and always moves forward. According to Rasheedah Phillips, this favors domination, appropriation, oppression and conquest, and it has implications that range from the way we relate to the environment to the way we have organized our educational system. In the African American community this is reflected in the way its members are treated by the labor system and by the legal system. “Time is so present in everything we do that we are not aware that it is a concept that has a history”, reflects Rasheedah, “and that,if we go back a bit, we find very different ways of thinking about it and understanding it. The main objective of Black Quantum Futurism is to develop alternative ways of thinking about time in order to build healthier ways of inhabiting it and that the black community can live better. What physics offers us is just that: new possibilities of thinking about time ”. "It is enough to stop at what quantum theory tells us about the behavior of particles," adds Camae, "that they are capable of coexisting in a number of possible states and traveling backwards in time, which has many similarities with what that tells the African tradition, in which time is not necessarily linear, but can be cyclical, and in which it not only advances forwards, but can also go backwards.Quantum mechanics gives us the possibility to reconnect with all that ”.

Clocks whose hands go slower or faster depending on how close or far the observer is, quantum event maps that gather present events to project into the future or reexamine the past, and a time portal where women of color can entering to create one's own temporality are some of the ways that Black Quantum Futurism has found to lower the metaphors on which they reflect into the field of experience. “Our way of working is less organic than at the beginning”, Rasheedah confesses, “because much of our work is now guided by our agenda. The advantage is that, by living together, there are still instances in which we can talk about what we are thinking to come up with new pieces that help us transform our perception of reality ”.

Awarded with the Collide Prize, which the Arts at CERN program and the city of Barcelona award to artists who link art and science, Black Quantum Futurism will spend two months at CERN in Geneva and one in Barcelona to delve into the mysteries of physics, in particular in the so-called CPT symmetry, a principle of invariance that involves charge, parity and the sense of time. The acronym CPT coincides with the one that postulates the existence of a colored people's time, a derogatory expression that is used to designate the time of people of color based on the assumption that they are always late and that they are few workers. The objective is, on the one hand, to highlight the fact that these observations are inscribed in the reality of a community that does not have the same access to transportation systems and, on the other,that its peculiarities have to do with the way in which the African tradition understands time, which is not connected to the time of the clock, but to the moment when everyone is present in a place, a more communal conception. A violation of CPT symmetry could be understood as well as a return to that way of assuming temporality. “We want to express the way we experience time as black women and bring out the value of this vision,” explains Rasheedah. “We have been told at times that why would we want to travel in time if we would end up going back to the days of slavery, but we believe that it is possible to travel to places where we will be safe, where we will be loved and respected, and that they can be both in the past and in the future ”.“We are excited about this residency at CERN and in Barcelona,” adds Camae, “because what we want is to continue expanding our exploration and for that we need to meet people from different parts of the world. The beauty of quantum theory is that it allows us to understand ourselves as small parts of a whole that, like particles, can travel in time and interact in ways that transcend space-time limitations to imagine new ways of thinking about reality ”.he can travel in time and relate in ways that transcend space-time limitations to imagine new ways of thinking about reality ”.he can travel in time and relate in ways that transcend space-time limitations to imagine new ways of thinking about reality ”.