The Black Speculative Arts
Imagining Black futures is not a new pursuit. In fact, it is a crucial part of the Black experience because it has always been important to advocate for a better future beyond our lifetimes.
Starting Fall 2021, ISE-DA’s “The Black Speculative Arts Project” will explore Black Imagination and Black Speculation through visual arts culture around the world. This project will touch on the visual dynamics present in music, design, film, books, and the fine arts industry.
Over the next few months we invite you to join us in engaging with a range of Speculative Arts concepts and ultimately, imagining that another reality is possible.
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is - it’s to imagine what is possible.
- bell hooks
2020 was a catalyzing environment that accentuated amassing socio-political and economic issues that were ultimately met with mass resistance. Through this time, as with past movements, visual culture archived how resistance has given way to liberation: Photographers have captured critical moments of change. In these moments, they have risked arrests and injury to document activists and protesters as they advocate for justice. Art has been used to provide parallels between movements of the past and present. No matter the medium or circumstance Art has always been a vital part of Black Liberation Movements.
However, visual culture serves not just as an archive but as a site for examining our current reality and a conduit for exploring the pathway to the environment after liberation. These moments of resistance urge us to answer the question,
“How do we see ourselves now and tomorrow?”
Much of the art produced from this present time focuses on ideating Black futures, revealing a necessity to envision better environments for Black communities. The global nature of the Black liberation movements in the summer of 2020 presented an accentuated need for more PanAfrican speculations of the future.
From the release of Black Futures to exhibitions such as Colours of my Dream in Switzerland there has been a cultural shift to focus on Black Speculation of visions and the varying realities in which Blackness can peacefully exist.
“Why is imagination important to black liberation?”
In a society driven by consumption we are either consuming or creating, there is no in-between. That leaves us with two options: internalize the oppressive ideologies and structures that we’ve always known to make up our reality, or imagine a new reality. Liberation means believing that another reality than the one we know now is possible.
One of the most effective tools for imagining the future is visual art. Even when consuming literature, music, or poetry, it is the act of visualization that breathes life into the future. The destination is the same...
The most effective tool of imagination is visual art. Visual art is one of the most important manifestations of imagination.
Imagination precedes creation.
Imagining Black futures is not a new pursuit. In fact, it is a crucial part of the Black experience because it has always been important to advocate for a better future beyond our lifetimes. As Afrofuturist Ytasha Womack comments, “Imagination is important. The imagination is a lifeline. The imagination is an extension of the resilience of the human spirit. It is the use of the imagination that is most significant because it helps people to transform their circumstances. Imagining oneself in the future creates agency.”
ISE-DA’s 2021 “The Black Speculative Arts Project” will explore Black Imagination and Black Speculation through visual arts culture around the world. Over the next few months, we invite you to join us in engaging with a range of Speculative Arts concepts and ultimately, imagining that another reality is possible.