In recent decades, the concepts of History and historical time have been challenged on a fundamental level. With the collapse of master narratives and the postmodern turn in historiography, history can no longer be thought of as an ordered, regulated and linear continuum guided by Progress. In a seminal work published in 1997, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, the philosopher Manuel DeLanda proposed to envisage History not as a sequential chain of cause and effect, but as consisting of reversals and bifurcations.

If in recent years the figure of the artist as historian has massively entered artistic practice, it originally sparked as many discussions about the protocols of historical inquiry, the constructivism of historical facts, the unstable boundaries between fiction and history, the index value of the archive, the monumentalization of Memory. Moreover, it is starting from methodologies which delineated the writing of history, such as anachronism, bifurcation, alternate history and reconstitution, that artists exacerbated the movement to deconstruct the sequential representation of historical time. Summoning concepts from this historiographical renewal,the event A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History focuses on alternative temporalities put forward by artists to rethink the staging of History (potential, speculative, retrospective, projective and retrocipative histories).

With: Kapwani Kiwanga / Mario Garcia Torres / The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) / Deimantas Narkevicius / Mariana Castillo Deball / Olivier Debroise / Monica Mayer / Louis Henderson / Christine Meisner / Yael Bartana / Rania Rafei & Raed Rafei / Santu Mofokeng / Mathieu K. Abonnenc / John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective

Encounters with: Ingrid LaFleur, Louis Henderson, Françoise Vergès, Monica Mayer, Yael Bartana (sous réserve), Zofia Waslicka, Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Estelle Nabeyrat, Rasha Salti, Christine Meisner, Annabela Tournon

Curated by Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós

Venues: Centre Pompidou, Institut Culturel Mexicain, Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Métropole, Le Cinématographe Nantes

Kapwani Kiwanga – AFROGALACTICA: A Short History of the Future, performance, 2011-2012, Courtesy the artist

Performance ‘Afrofuturism’ by Kapwani Kiwanga

Wednesday November 6, 2013

Centre Pompidou – 7pm – Cinema 2
Performance, 40’, 2011-2012

With the presence of Ingrid LaFleur, curator based in Detroit, USA.
Commissariat : Aliocha Imhoff et Kantuta Quirós

Kapwani Kiwanga, in the role of an anthropologist from the future, comes back on Afrofuturism and on its involvement in the development of the future Space Agency of the United States of Africa. She draws on archives from the past while projecting a science fictional future.

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