Mar 6, 2020 – May 9, 2021
Beyond the World’s End
See how art can help us think creatively about combating climate change and social injustices.
Radical Futurisms Film Series: Part I
Watch short films at the Del Mar Theater in Downtown Santa Cruz to dive deeper into our upcoming exhibition Beyond the World’s End.
Catch this three-part film series to dive deeper into a year-long research, exhibition, and public lecture series co-created with UC Santa Cruz. Directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, this series brings leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UCSC to discuss what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and how we can cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU
Visit the Exhibition
Featured Films
The Last Angel of History, 1995
Black Audio Film Collective (UK)
One of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, this cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness. The analysis is rooted in an exploration of the cultural works of Afrofuturist artists, such as funkmaster George Clinton and his Mothership Connection, Sun Ra’s use of extra- terrestrial iconography, and the connections drawn between these issues in the writings of black science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler.
Until The Quiet Comes, 2012
Kahlil Joseph (US)
An amalgam of the work of director Kahlil Joseph, composer Flying Lotus and dancer and choreographer Storyboard P, this video wordlessly narrates the ubiquitous and rarely spotlighted story of urban violence, resilience, community and creativity. While the killings of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Trayvon Martin provoked temporary national attention, ultimately the incident of a murdered black man (or the countless who are doomed to be imprisoned despite their intelligence, creativity, talent, kindness or youth) continues to remain overlooked—or worse, recognized and accepted as an unalterable fact.
Time Travel Experiments, 2017
Black Quantum Futurism (shot by Bob Sweeney) (US)
Time Travel Experiments draws on the time travel manual embedded in the novel
Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), a book of interconnected chronomigration stories written and self-published by Rasheedah Phillips in 2014, with a soundscape created by Moor Mother, who together form Black Quantum Futurism. BQF is a transformative approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into, and enliven, possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derive its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. BQF’s work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.
Wakening, 2013
Danis Goulet, (Cree/Métis)
In the near future, the environment has been destroyed and society suffocates under a brutal military occupation. A lone Cree wanderer Weesakechak (the benevolent cultural hero and trickster of the Cree tribe) searches an urban war zone to find the ancient and dangerous Weetigo (Weetigo (terrifying cannibal spirit of Cree traditional lore) to help fight against the occupiers.
Coordinates, 2018
Woodbine collective (US)
This short essay film from anarchist collective Woodbine addresses the state of contemporary catastrophism, a planet increasingly screen-captured and AI obsessed racing toward extinction. “Against the end of the world,” this is the time for mass revolt, the art of existence, inventing radical models of futurity based within collective struggle.
The Film Series
7-9pm | Del Mar Theater
Wednesday, March 4th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 11th | View the Films >>
Wednesday, March 18th | View the Films >>
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