Moor Mother – a Philadelphia artist praised as part of “a new generation of visionary black storytellers” (The New York Times) – premieres a new video as part of Indexical’s continued online programming. Weaving through haunting slave narratives as dystopian allegory, negro spirituals, and Black ritual, Moor Mother’s work points to a liberated future through Black Quantum Futurism, a project in partnership with author Rasheedah Phillips. Through a time of ecological and social disaster, she says, “I’m not saying, this is the end, we’re all doomed,” but rather that “I believe there is another way. So it’s about trying to get the audience to understand another way of digesting the truth.”

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A screening of her new video piece will be followed by a discussion of Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice conducted with her collaborator Rasheedah Phillips, and facilitated by T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. As part of their project with UCSC and Indexical, the artists and Black Quantum Futurism practitioners will lead a workshop related to their practice with students from UCSC.

This event is part of the Beyond the End of the World symposium through the Center for Creative Ecologies at UCSC, the Visualizing Abolition series of online events through the Institute for Arts & Sciences at UCSC, The Humanities Institute at UCSC, and in collaboration with Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz.

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a nationally- and internationally-touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Her most recent album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is the culmi¬nation of all of her earthly experiences merged with all of her cosmic ones. On Analog Fluids, haunting slave narratives are presented as dystopian allegory and negro spirituals are flipped, remixed, and recaptured, only to be digitized into a symbiotic bio-morph program for the post-thumb drive age. It’s a rcord rich with the noise and chaos that affirm Moor Mother’s punk roots, yet it is also anchored in earthiness via the constant in¬jection of Black ritual, poetry, and drums programmed to vibrate through the listener’s mitochondria.

Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. BQF Collective frequently collaborates with other Black Futurists Joy KMT, Irreversible Entanglements, Thomas Stanley, Ras Mashramani, Alex Smith to produce literature, present workshops, lectures, and performances.