A Season of Black Study
This seminar series A Season of Black Study is curated by the research project FutureBrownSpace, an initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, of being, of activism or community) and for anyone who wishes to appreciate, and join in its significance for a more coalitional, less neo-colonial future; whether your access to Black Study is through the brown, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study.
The seminar series is hosted under the theme A Festival of Black Thought and collaboration with Moderna Museet, Cinema Africa, Gothenburg Bienalle, Gulbenkian Theatre London, Etnografiska Museet and SouthNord AfroNordic Bienalle.
Read more about the research project FutureBrownSpace
Seminars
Writing Part 1: Practices of Anti-Racism and Unconscious Racism
13 September at 13:00-16:00
John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor in Performing Arts. FutureBrownSpace Curator.
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Perfumance, the colonial capture of scent
20 September at 13:00-16:00
Toubab Holmes is a Swedish-Senagalese musician, graduate of the M.A in Contemporary Circus Practice, curator within FutureBrownSpace and apprentice perfumier.
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Ethnobotanical research: (self-)care and the Black historical archive (the political power of sleep)
27 September at 13:00-16:00
Cecilia Germain is a Swedish-Canadian visual artist focussing on topics concerning colonial structures now and in the past, grief, healing, social justice and public health.
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Alexis Pauline Gumbs in conversation with Judith Kiros.
4 October at 15:00-17:00 on Zoom
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, and co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. In 2020, she was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her book-in-progress, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: A Cosmic Biography.
Judith Kiros is a co-founder of Kontext Press, a cross-media platform for thoughtful journalism and critical entertainment launched in 2019. In 2019, Kiros debuted "O," a mix of essays and poetry, in which she explores blackness and feminism based on William Shakespeare's Othello.
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Fish out of water: co-creating belonging through site-oriented
performance
11 October at 13:00-16:00
Mmatumisang Motsisi is theatre-maker, educator and performer based in Stellenbosch, South Africa. She facilitates meaning making through the body as the primary means of discovery, exploration and expression. Her work emerges from a curiosity around People, Place and Positionality. She is currently pursuing a Dual Award PhD in Higher Education at Stellenbosch University and Coventry University.
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The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu
A live art performance by Ibokwe Albert Khoza,
13-14 October at 18:00-19:30
Exhibits showcasing artefacts and actual people were popular in the western world during the colonial period. How do we deal with a shameful legacy that echoes into the present? Should we seek to erase it, bury it in the history books, or resurrect and acknowledge this difficult past? This work will dwell heavily on the early recorded study of black bodies as a "different species" to the white man. Performance artist Ibokwe Albert Khoza pays tribute to the spirit of Sarah Baartman and the many Africans whose lives and bodies were turned into a spectacle for white supremacist pleasure. We pay homage to our ancestry who gave up everything for the benefit of the world at large.
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Marquis Bey – Ordinary Black Radicality
18 October at 13:00-16:00
This talk will offer thoughts on how the black radical tradition—or, a radical notion of blackness—is woven through the ordinary. In supplementation to more spectacular acts of radical work like protests and demonstrations and riots, this talk shares the radicality of the ordinary: the quotidian, everyday practices of refusal and cultivation of life stolen from coloniality, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.
Dr. Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, with appointments in English and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Their work focuses on trans and nonbinary studies, black feminist theory, abolition, and black radical thought. They are the author, most recently, of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both published with Duke University Press, 2022). Learn more about their work at marquisbey.com.
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Marquis Bey at Moderna Museet – Public Talk
20 October at 18:30
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Writing Part 2: Intersectionality – practices, (dis)identifications, cohesions and collisions
25 October at 13:00-16:00
John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor in Performing Arts. FutureBrownSpace Curator.
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Albert “Ibokwe” Khoza talks about The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu.
1 November at 13:00-16:00
Albert “Ibokwe” Khoza.
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Writing Part 3: The Stages of Grief: What does it mean to “lose” race?
15 November at 13:00-16:00
John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor in Performing Arts. FutureBrownSpace Curator
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The Physics of Black Art Or, Must Blackness Be Visible?
22 November at 13:00-16:00
Michelle M. Wright author of The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Epistemology of the Middle Passage, discusses the complex politics around "Black Art", and why Black visual artists are often at odds with academic theorists of Black identity on the nature and notion of Blackness. Beginning with the twinned concepts of history and race, Wright's lecture takes us through philosophy, geography, theoretical particle physics and the visual arts to finally answer the question if Blackness must be visible in art.
Michelle M. Wright is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where she teaches courses in African American and Black European literary traditions, as well as seminars on theorizing race and belonging in Black and African Diaspora Studies. She is the author of Becoming Black: creating identity in the African diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: beyond the Middle Passage epistemology (2015), and is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled Afroeuropolis and the Agency of Space, which looks at how Black writers from across the Diaspora imagine the space of Western Europe.
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Michelle M. Wright at Moderna Museet – Public Talk
24 November at 18:30-19:30
The Black Archives
29 November at 13:00-16:00
Jonelle Twum (Black Archive Sweden),
Israa Elkogali Häggström (Filmaker) on Healing the Sudanese Archive at Etnografiska Museet and Levi Appleton on Black Trans Archives (Uppsala University)
Jonelle Twum is a filmmaker, artistic director, researcher, and producer who works using archives and film to explore the perspectives and the narratives of minor/disregarded/unacknowledged figures. She often explores conditions of in/visibility, memory, and historiography from a Black feminist perspective. Twum is the founder of Black Archives Sweden, a contemporary archive with starting point in Afro-Swedish experiences.
Issraa Elkogali Häggström is an award winning Sudanese-Swedish writer and filmmaker with an MFA in Film from Boston University. Her debut documentary short, IN SEARCH OF HIP HOP (Official selection IFFR and DIFF 2013) was shown in more than 14 countries and purchased by BBC Arabic. Executive producer and screenwriter of the award winning short fiction film A HANDFUL OF DATES (2020), and Co-Producer of feature film Goodbye Julia (2023), Issraa is currently developing multilingual feature length film projects. Furthermore Issraa has experience with creating award winning plays, films and art installations as a director, producer, and writer, in Sweden, Norway, the UK, USA, Egypt and Sudan.
Levi Appleton is an artist/activist/organizer who recently completed his Masters in Gender Studies at Uppsala University with a thesis exploring the trans black archive as a restorative tool for the future.
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