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Camae Ayewa

Philadelphia, PA

Camae Ayewa has spent over fifteen years creating, organizing, performing, and curating music in punk rock, underground hip hop communities, sound healing communities, before becoming a professional touring and recording musician. Ayewa’s research interests are primarily focused on time and temporality. Her sonic work primarily considers how time imprints itself on communities, as well as how time is experienced in the lives of oppressed people and the social constructs they are situated within. Most at stake in her work is the ability of marginalized people to envision the future(s) beyond the limitations of class. Ayewa has examined the emergence of linear, mechanical clock time in the West and its explicit ties to legacies of race, gender, and environmental warfare waged on marginalized individuals.


Member of:

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix.

Time Zone Protocols: Confederate States


Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix.

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Camae Ayewa has spent over fifteen years creating, organizing, performing, and curating music in punk rock, underground hip hop communities, sound healing communities.

Artist Bio

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based housing advocate, parent, interdisciplinary artist, and Black Futurist cultural producer.

Artist Bio

Using Afrofuturism and Black Quantum Futurism as frameworks, Time Zone Protocols: Confederate States explores the rules underlying Western time constructs with a specific focus in the original Confederate states in America below the Mason-Dixon line. Touring nine southern Confederate states, Black Quantum Futurism will gather field sounds, poetry, and images, and study and participate in local practices of time created through neighborhood walks and communal gatherings. The intermedia work will include a vinyl album based on the journey and archive, and a series of images, sounds, and maps relevant to the social history of Black American time and space. The project highlights how Black people re-envision, rewrite, resist, and dismantle material realities of clock time.


Award Year
2022
Status

In Progress

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Black Quantum Futurism

Philadelphia, PA

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix. Through writing, film, visual art, performance, sound, socially-engaged art, printmaking, and creative research, they explore the intersections of futurism, temporality, DIY technolPhiladelphia, PAogy and aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities. Repurposing the language and imagery of science and science fiction, Black Quantum Futurism uncovers counter-histories, Afro-diasporic mythologies, and Black quantum womanist futures that challenge exclusionary, mainstream versions of history and future. Their work includes the award-winning Community Futures Lab/Community Futurisms project. Black Quantum Futurism received a 2021 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, a 2021 Collide Residency with CERN Arts, 2018 Velocity Fund Grant, 2018 Solitude x ZKM Web Resident, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow, 2017 Pew Fellowship, and 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellowship. Black Quantum Futurism has presented, exhibited and performed at Red Bull Arts, Manifesta 13, Chicago Architecture Biennale, Serpentine Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, REDCAT, Bergen Kunsthall, Le Gaite Lyrique, and will exhibit at documenta fifteen.


Individual Bios

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based housing advocate, parent, interdisciplinary artist, and Black Futurist cultural producer.

Camae Ayewa has spent over fifteen years creating, organizing, performing, and curating music in punk rock, underground hip hop communities, sound healing communities.

A brown-skinned Black person with shoulder length locs and bright blue lipstick is sitting at a wooden picnic table wearing a tan-colored coat with a mudcloth patterned scarf around their neck. Behind them is a park landscape with grass, overcast sky, and bare trees in late winter.

Rasheedah Phillips

Philadelphia, PA

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based public interest attorney, mother, interdisciplinary artist, and Black Futurist cultural producer whose writing has appeared in Keywords for Radicals, Temple Political and Civil Right Journal, The Funambulist Magazine, Recess Arts, and more. She is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, a founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, and co-creator of Community Futures Lab. She is a social justice advocate, a 2016 graduate of Shriver Center’s Racial Justice Institute, and a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. As part of BQF Collective and as a solo artist, Phillips has been a Vera List Center, A Blade of Grass, and Velocity Fund Fellow, and has exhibited, presented, been in residence, and performed at Institute of Contemporary Art London, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Serpentine Gallery, Red Bull Arts, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Akademie Solitude, and more.


Member of:

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix.