Saul William’s fantastic musical feature Neptune Frost (2022), sets the tone for the coalition series “Hacking Time Mines”. In the Afrofuturistic sci-fi musical, the mythical encounter of a miner and the intersex Neptune sparks a hacker community’s rebellion against neo-colonialism and gender restrictions. Neptune Frost is a thrilling exploration of queerness, romance, collective resistance and the role of the medium of music within it. Its non-linear narrative modes, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, in-between the past, the present and the future, make it a vivid example of cyclical temporality that is rooted in African and Afro-diasporic cosmologies.
There are many genealogical traces to Afrofuturist visionary Sun Ra’s brilliant sci-fi movie Space is the Place (1973). Space is the Place looks outward, beyond the earthly confines, and takes music as a vehicle for space travel, as well as a hacker’s device, to decode and recode the dominant scripts of reality. Sun Ra sees himself, as an African American, as being left out of Eurocentric history books – as his story – and is rather interested in mystery that he equated with ‘my story’, the mystery that he set out to write himself throughout the course of his life.
Both the movie and Sun Ra and his Arkestra need to be understood within the context of the space race, however, with an alternate trajectory to the dominant imperial narrative of conquering space. Thinking about the future of life on planet Earth coupled with imaginaries of outer space has a long and contested tradition in the history of mankind, as Abel Tilahun’s extract from Imagine the Cosmos (2023) shows. Particularly the moon kept fueling the human imagination and blurring the line between empirical reality and fantastic vision.
Contrasting this retrospective mode, the Kenian filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) offers a sci-fi vision of an African future in the aftermath of World War III. Every single resource remains within the cycle, nothing is lost. In showing the dystopic tendencies of such a possible future, Pumzi offers a critique of ecotopic narratives.
Taking up a similar strand, Kantarama Gahigiri short film Terra Mater (2023) takes one of the biggest challenges of the present day and age – the enormous mountains of garbage that are being dumped throughout the African continent as a result of many years of overexploitation. The garbage collectors, somehow reminiscent of mine workers, are being watched over by a trash goddess, restoring a sacred dimension of the demystified wasteland. Terra Mater explores our relationship to land as a site for possible future healing.
Two other recent films will be screened that negotiate African presence between the colonial past and mythical visions of the future (LOBI KUNA by Matthias de Groof and MULIKA by Maisha Maene).
Pius Vögele, Center of African Studies
University of Basel, Switzerland
Curated with Pius Vögele, University of Basel, and screened at #junction Nairobi.
