Traces of Ecstasy: Modeling Anarchic Pan-African Futures for the 21st Century brings together artists, theorists, and writers primarily from Africa and its diasporas to explore a constellation of experimental and contemporary approaches to ever-evolving discourses and practices of decolonization.
Oriented towards a refashioned anarchic horizon of pan-African liberation suited for the twenty-first century, the publication (serving as an independent discursive companion to a transatlantic curatorial project that occurred in Nigeria and the United States—involving a site-responsive pavilion, exhibitions, performances, and symposia) seeks to model alternative political grammars, technological conditions, cosmological frontiers, aesthetic practices, and forms of life that exceed the statist and colonial-capitalist world order. The publication's contents respond on critical and poetic, historical and futural, and material and metaphysical terms to a series of urgent themes informing the global present. Featuring newly commissioned essays, interviews, reprints, and visual documentation of artworks from the exhibition's locations, Traces of Ecstasy provides an Afri-indigenous, Afri-queer, and Afri-technological lens to challenge and reimagine dominant discourses on and visions of planetary futures.
KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and scholar-critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anti-colonial/imperial critique, black radical thought, and indigenous philosophies, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices that respond to the world-historical conditions produced by racial/colonial-capitalist modernity.
