13.05.2026 / þ thorns þ

Episode 20: Black Quantum Futurism

þ thorns þ

This episode is a conversation with Black Quantum Futurism, an interdisciplinary practice founded by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa. In this conversation, they take us on a journey through their practice, how they met, how their collaboration began, and what has unfolded between then, now, and beyond.

This episode is a conversation with Black Quantum Futurism, an interdisciplinary practice founded by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa. Their work brings together quantum physics with Afro-diasporic understandings of time, space, ritual, text, and sound, creating frameworks for counter histories and alternative futures. Rasheedah is a writer, artist, and housing advocate whose work explores temporalities and community futurisms through a Black Futurist lens. Camae, also known as Moor Mother, is a musician, poet, and a visual artist whose practice moves across sound, performance, and collaboration.

This episode is an extension of that collaboration and part of the exhibition's public program. In this conversation, they generously take us on a journey through their practice, how they met, how their collaboration began, and what has unfolded between then, now, and beyond. They share their thinking on time, black holes, and nonlinear temporalities, offering ways of understanding the apocalypse not as an ending, but as a site of transformation, delay, and return.

Find out more about Camae and Rasheedah on our People page.

To the Glossary they donate Retrocurrences .

This episode, is part of a series of þ thorns þ called Choreographing the Apocalypse. It is curated by Mine Kaplangı and is part of their ongoing research into queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypses. Through the series they’re inviting artists, thinkers, and somatic practitioners to explore apocalyptic thinking through speculative, world building and radically intimate frameworks. The project is inspired by Oxana Timofeeva’s idea that apocalypse is not a singular event, but a cyclical and continuous condition.

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant. The series is curated by Mine Kaplangı with additional concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Transcript:

MARTIN

Hello and welcome to þ thorns , a podcast where we bring you conversations in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler's Wells. I'm Martin Hargreaves, Head of the Choreographic School. I've invited Mine Kaplangı to curate a series of the podcast, and I'll hand over now to Mine to explain more.

MINE

My name is Mine Kaplangı. I'm a Folkstone-based curator and art mediator from Istanbul. We have titled this series Choreographing the Apocalypse, and it forms part of my ongoing research into queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypse. Through the series, I invite artists, thinkers, and somatic practitioners to explore apocalyptic thinking through speculative world-building and radically intimate frameworks.

Working with Camae and Rasheedah has been deeply formative for me. Their work shaped the program I co-curated at VSSL Studio, Entanglements of the Apocalypse, where they recently presented their solo exhibition, Time Is On Our Side. This episode is an extension of that collaboration and part of the exhibition's public program. In this conversation, they generously take us on a journey through their practice, how they met, how their collaboration began, and what has unfolded between then, now, and beyond. They share their thinking on time, black holes, and nonlinear temporalities, offering ways of understanding the apocalypse not as an ending, but as a site of transformation, delay, and return. Their work continues to teach me so much, and I'm deeply grateful to have them as part of this series. This conversation was recorded in Philadelphia.

The documentation of their exhibition, Time Is On Our Side, is now available on our website. Time Is On Our Side reimagines the black hole not as a site of destruction, but as one of creation and transformation, where time folds, stretches, and re-emerges in unexpected ways. A full transcript of this episode, along with links to further resources, including Black Quantum Futurism's work and writings, can be found on our website.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurism

RASHEEDAH

Hi, we're Black Quantum Futurism.

CAMAE

Yes, my name is Camae Ayewa.

RASHEEDAH

I'm Rasheedah Phillips.

CAMAE

And we have been working together for over a decade at this point. It's been such a beautiful collaboration. We met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, we both…we’re actually, neither of us are from Philadelphia, as in born, but we both came to Philadelphia at different points in our lives and connected. I'm from a small city called Trenton, New Jersey, and-

CAMAE

I'm from a small town called Aberdeen, Maryland.

RASHEEDAH

And I ended up in Philly because when I was around 14 years old, my family moved there, and I went to high school and college there. And then I think it was after I graduated law school, yeah, I started getting into... Philly has a very amazing DIY scene. There was just a lot of things happening in terms of, like, spoken word and just an ability to start your own thing. And Philly was, like, really cheap to live in, and you could get venues. It was just a very amazing DIY community. And I started, like, going out and traveling and going to different shows and stuff, and then met, eventually with Camae.

CAMAE

Philadelphia is a really great grassroots DIY community. And so, I came to Philadelphia to study photography at a local art school. And I really was apprehensive to get involved in the Philadelphia scene. I just wanted to focus on photography. But as you see, the city is beaming with arts, whether it's art on the walls, we have a great mural program, or it's within the DIY community of anarchist bookstores and cafes, just places where people could really come together. And I started an event series called Rockers in Philadelphia that was showcasing marginalized political genre-hopping performers and artists within Philadelphia and the surrounding areas.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, and I s- so I started going to some of those shows and got really inspired. I was always a person who was into science fiction, but before I found, like, Rockers and other venues that featured marginalized and Black artists and creatives, I was, like, often going into more white spaces, especially things that were related to science fiction and, you know, and I felt really excluded and kinda segregated in those places. And then Afrofuturism started to emerge as a genre, and I found out about it, and it really changed my world. I also was reading Octavia Butler and lots of other Black sci-fi artists around that time.

It felt like a great time to be able to put on events again, inspired by Camae’s, the Rockers shows, and other friends who had their own events. Like, we had a friend who has a…had a spoken word poetry event as well, The Last Word. And then also I had been, became part of a collective of queer sci-fi writers. We called ourselves Metropolarity. And so yeah, things were just really amazing and special during that period of time where you could just be who you wanted to be. And all of this I was doing, like, while working full-time as a lawyer for legal services. And then, yeah, amongst all of that, Camae and I met. And really, like, the first way we met was, like, a friend who knew both of our work introduced us to each other's blogs. So, I had a blog calledAstroMytholosophy at that time, and Camae had a blog called SuperDeathStar-

CAMAE

-ShipGo.

RASHEEDAH

And then we were like, "Whoa, we have a lot in common. We're writing about or blogging about similar things." And then we met out in the real world, just, like, ran into each other, and then, yeah, just became fast collaborators and friends.

CAMAE

By this time, around 2008, Rockers had been going on for about six years, so it was now a great community of like-minded artists. And Rasheedah spoke about The Last Word, which was an open mic poetry reading. Once that ac- came along a bit after Rockers, we really had this super strong community of creatives that could start an event or host a fundraiser anywhere around the city. It was a great time in Philadelphia, and we learned a lot from those before us writers, artists, painters that would gather in Philly In the 80's and the 90's, and some of those people would be Sun Ra, one of our great musicians come out of Philadelphia, and many more great artists like-minded as Sun Ra.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, and not just artists in Philadelphia. Like, our events, because of how they were set up and because we took such care with our artists and with the communities that we were connected to, we had people come from all over. And so in 2011, I would go on to start the Afrofuturist Affair, which was an annual charity and costume ball, and again was really inspired by folks like Camae and other people in the city who were doing these DIY events. And so yeah, the Afrofuturist Affair, the first year we had it, we had people from as far as New Orleans to New York come to that first event, and come back, would come back every year because people wanted that kind of community. And it was a unique event at that time to have something that's not Halloween, right, but is dedicated to Black science fiction and speculative fiction creators. And not just books, but films and costumes and all sorts of things. And so, the Afrofuturist Affair charity and costume ball ran for seven or eight years. We had the event other places, but its home was in Philadelphia, and, like, we had one version that was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was really, really special, just absolutely magical and amazing. Yeah, and lots of other events. And at, by that time, Camae and I were formally working together. Black Quantum Futurism didn't start until about 2014, but in between that time, Camae was helping to curate Afrofuturist Affair and other events. And so that's when we started to really get deeper into Afrofuturism and Black science fiction, and that would be the seeds of what would become Black Quantum Futurism.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurism

CAMAE

I remember Wine, Spirit and Mind, an event that Rasheedah had put on and I helped curate, but I also would perform, and that would be some of the beginning stages of Moor Mother without a band. When I first started Moor Mother in Philadelphia, I had about a six-piece band behind me, and that proved a bit of difficulty, especially coming out of having my own punk band, The Mighty Paradox. And so I really focused on what would it be like to really have a solo practice, and it was a beautiful journey to go and see the different ideas that that could be, the possibilities.

Curation to me was very easy when it came to Philadelphia because we had already laid down so much groundwork as far as the stage, for the people to see the exploration and the development, of the artwork and the artists and the music that will take place over the next years in Philadelphia.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, and Afrofuturist Affair and other similar events,The Last Word spoken word event, these were also places for me to experiment with my work. I had, once I graduated law school and started my career, I had started writing fiction again. And so again, joined Metropolularity, and that really became a place for me to read my stories out loud and test my work with other folks, and would eventually lead to me self-publishing a book. And that's where some of our first collaborations came from as Black Quantum Futurism.

So, I would go and read some of my short stories out loud, and Camae would provide improvised music behind it. And then once I self-published my book of time travel stories, Recurrence Plot and Other Time Travel Tales, Camae developed a soundscape for the book that had eight songs on it, or seven songs on it, that matched each chapter of the book. And then again, I would go read the stories out loud and she would provide improvised music or we had the soundscapes. So that really became the seeds of Black Quantum Futurism. From there we were like, "Oh, let's do more stuff," and started to write essays together and, and create zines that we would go on to print during this time.

Like our practice was really... I mean, it continues to be super expansive just based on, again, different DIY community practices around creativity, such as having bands, creating zines, other things that we can do ourselves. We don't have to rely on a publishing industry. And especially when Afrofuturism, even though, as Camae said, it's been around forever, we've had artists like Sun Ra back in the 50's and W.E.B. Du Bois writing story, science fiction stories, right? Afrofuturism's been around even before the term was coined. But again, there was like a consciousness emerging around it at that time, that was just really special and unique. People discovering or rediscovering that Black people have always lived speculative lives and used speculation as a technology.

CAMAE

We would start to look at the success of Recurrence Plot, and really think about creating, or creating this kind of publishing arm that would be the muscle, the force of Black Quantum Futurism. And we continued to develop the skills of writing and creating soundscapes, and curating installations and performances, and we would just continue to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah. One of the first exhibitions that we had, or installation art, was related to Recurrence Plot. My whole approach, and our approach really, is that science fiction is reality. Sci-fi is reality. The book that I wrote, Recurrence Plot, it's each story revolves around a household technology that can help a person to be able to time travel, like a bracelet or a watch. And so, the exhibition that we created, again, another DIY situation where we knew somebody with a gallery and they were like, "Yo, come do a show real quick." And so that first show, I think that was in 2014, was called The Time Travel Convention, and it featured other artists too who had different types of time travel art pieces and films and things like that. So that was our first exhibition. And yeah, something about being able to actualize what seems like abstract ideas to other people or to the world, right? Like, time travel doesn't seem possible, right? Like, for us, again, it's a part of our reality. It is possible. And so being able to actualize these ideas, something about it was addictive, and so we, we made installation art a part of our practice, and soon would develop, yeah, recognition, uh, starting in Philly and then expanding out to other places.

And one of our first projects, again, was, like, developing a zine, a series of zines that would eventually turn into a book, Black Quantum Futurism Theory and Practice, um, which became a book series. And as Camae said, self-publishing, it being an important part of our practice as well, being able to- also publish other people and other works like Camae’s poetry books. And I wrote another novella that we were able to self-publish. So yeah, just being able to have control over that and not having to get caught up in the industry and all its disappointments and waiting and all of that. Although last year I came out with a book that was officially published by a press for the first time, which was awesome. But something about us having our own means of publishing and being able to control the timing, especially when we need and want to share important messages that are also multimodal. So, for each zine, like we'll produce a soundscape. We'll focus on a particular thing. Like when Sandra Bland, the Black woman activist who was murdered by police in the jail a few years ago, we created a zine and a soundscape to reflect on her death. So yeah, just these kinds of topics that are important that we're able to create projects around and actualize speculation as a technology.

TRANSITION SOUNDS:Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurism

CAMAE

I also released a book of poetry on Hat and Beard Press, American Equations. I learned a lot as we both moved to that sector to release our writings. But we also learned that it is important to have that duality to be able to get your books out to more people in the world. But also, there's something very special about self-publishing, and that's an aspect that we both greatly admire, and that's not to say that we won't come together and self-publish another work. I definitely hope that we do sooner, but I think it's just really important for artists to take agency over the outcomes and outputs of their work.

Community Futurisms was our final book as far as this series, and it really speaks to all the work that we had been nurturing and cultivating in Philadelphia because the climate was this community futurisms, 'cause we could see in real time the networks, the strong support systems that would come out of these curated events, not just put on by Rasheedah and myself, but also very creative people within our scene in the community. Release great works of art and writings and would later develop wonderful organizations and have spaces where this kind of communication and facilitation of our work, and many works, could happen, could breathe and live.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, and that brings us to some of our favourite projects as Black Quantum Futurism. I think one of them that continues on in many different forms is the Community Futures Lab. And so that is connected to the book that Camae was talking about, Community Futurisms. That's the last book in our BQF series of books. Community Futures Lab was a space that we opened in Philadelphia in a storefront from 2016 to 2017. And it was really focused on, there was a community in Philadelphia that was undergoing extreme gentrification and displacement in North Philadelphia, right down the street from where Camae and I lived. And as a public interest attorney, I was supporting and representing a lot of people who lived in that area to help them to fight for their housing, or to fight to not be displaced without supports and benefits. And so, we had an opportunity. We got a fellowship from A Blade of Grass, which is a New York-based community engaged social art practice grant fund. They gave us $15,000 and somehow we were able to use that money to open up a storefront for the year and right in the heart of that community where the displacement was occurring. And so, the Community Futures Lab was really a space for folks in that community to be able to drop in whenever they wanted, get resources about what was happening in the community.

And we also had oral futures interviews instead of oral history interviews for people to be able to speak into existence what they wanted to see in that community, because they had not been really consulted by the government and by the entities that were displacing them to build luxury housing. We opened up the space to give them an opportunity to share those visions that have been where their voices have been left out. And also, we held a lot of Black Quantum Futurism, Afrofuturism type workshops. We had a lot of guests come into that space as well. We hosted a Afrofutures Affair charity and costume ball in that space. So many beautiful things emerged over that year of time, and the ways in which the community came around to like actively support that space was just amazing and unique.

And so, although that project only lasted a year in that particular storefront, the Community Futures Lab continues in other iterations. We've been able to have the Community Futures Lab in London, in St. Louis, in Detroit, Chicago, different places where we've been able to open that space. Even though it's not as long as a year, it's often like three months, but the spaces replicates the kind of community that we built in Philadelphia. For example, when we did the Community Futures Lab in St. Louis, we had workshops where the community could come in, put on their own workshops. I collaborated with a bunch of local organizers to do housing workshops out at the lab and other creative things. And then it's also a space that's very self-activated and so people can come in. You don't need to have a workshop or anything going on, but there's like an oral futures booth where you can record oral futures on your own. There's a library where folks can sit and read and get resources. And so again, the Community Futures Lab is self-activated and also very specific to the community that it's in.

CAMAE

We also was able to, at the Community Futures Lab, hire these wonderful set of interns. And they would help us to really host some of these great workshops that we did and also host the nightlife. We had a lot of different musicians come through the Community Futures Lab to do performances. Definitely I would perform, but we had some people that are really popular now, like JPEGMAFIA, perform at the Communities Futures Lab. And there's something very special about the history of this particular location, Cecil B. Moore and North Philadelphia. This was a place where the jazz greats of their time in the 50s and 60's would come and perform. And it was also a cruising district where many artists and just big, big presence, presences from the community would come together and just show up. So, it was a great place for us to activate again because once we started doing our workshops and really the first few weeks of opening Community Futures Lab, you could really feel this activation, not just within our scene, but within the surrounding communities.

TRANSITION SOUNDS:Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurism

CAMAE

A favourite project for me would be a bit later on when we would be one of the only artists from America represented at Documenta in Germany. That was really great to be able to hold space for artists in that community or artists associated with Documenta. But we had a chance to take over the subway. We were able to build a stage on the waterway and give a really impactful performance that capsulated everything in the themes that we had been working with.

At this time, Rasheedah had just come from CERN with a lot of interviews around time, with some of the scientists there at CERN. So, I would use those interviews to create a beautiful soundscape that was on loop within the subway, that would relate to the later stage performance. It just really was a favourite project of mine to work on because we could really stretch the ideas of our work in many different mediums. And when I get to do that, and when we get to do that, we are our most happiest.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, I think another favourite project of mine, which Camae just mentioned, was- being able to be in residency at CERN. CERN is the biggest particle physics lab in the world. It's based in Switzerland and France. We were able to get a residency there. They have artist residencies, even though it's a huge science laboratory. It holds the Large Hadron Collider. And I got to live on CERN's campus for three months, essentially. It was just such an amazing once in a lifetime experience to be able to convene with quantum physicists and nuclear physicists and talk time, time and space, and to do that for three months and it was just such a unique experience. And I felt extremely welcomed and well received, and people who listened to my curiosities and my questions about time and temporality and, yeah. And also, being able to share my work and perspectives as well with scientists and ask them these kind of nitty-gritty questions around quantum physics, which, you know, we've been studying on our own for a long time. Part of the residency also included being able to go to Barcelona and talk with physicists there and astronomers. Just a once in a lifetime, like, really unique and beautiful experience. Anything else we should talk about?

CAMAE

I think diving into the world of Black Quantum Futurism. As I travelled the world, I see that it's been an immense inspiration to many people, and I just wanna thank those out there that have been interacting with the work. I hear some of the most beautiful things, just last week in New York or whether I'm in Germany, in Munich, even Australia, China, all over the world, I hear people say that this book changed their lives. This book, the project of Black Quantum Futurism, opened their frames of thinking. It really made them feel like they were not alone and they were a part of a community where they had the agency to continue to open horizons, and I just am so thankful to the people out there that have tuned in and supported the journey of Black Quantum Futurism. And yeah, I'm just immensely thankful to be a part of this communion that is Black Quantum Futurism, BQF. So just thank you so much, and I see you and I hear you.

RASHEEDAH

Yeah, agree. Another project that we didn't talk about is Time Zone Protocols, which has also seen several iterations, but it's looking at time zones and the global sort of temporal oppression that many of us experience through things like daylight savings time. And it looks at the histories of clocks and time and how that has facilitated global imperialism, but it also looks at some of the resistance practices that Black communities and other Indigenous communities have developed and used to resist that global imperialism of time, including the project Time Zone Protocols, which we brought together. The first iteration of that was in New York City, and we were able to bring together 20 or 30 Black physicists and creatives and conjurers and teachers, to come and give new protocols of time, that we could utilize instead of the ones that have been laid out in, by global imperialists over hundreds of years ago or a hundred years ago.

So that was Time Zone Protocols, and we were able to do an iteration of that in South Korea recently in Seoul, where we had Seoul-based artists and other artists come and give lectures and workshops around time and new time zone protocols. So that was really amazing, again, to be able to take our work around the world really and connect with other communities that are also thinking about these questions, experiencing temporal oppression, and able to develop new communal ways of engaging with time and space. And so that's another project, and you can go on timezoneprotocols.space to look at some of those outcomes from those projects.

You know, we didn't really get into the philosophy of our work too much 'cause it's early where we're at. Talking about time and temporalities, my active temporality doesn't awaken until well after 11am, so we're not going to get too much into the philosophy. But thankfully there's so much information online, so many free resources.

CAMAE

And I was just gonna say that Rasheedah does a really good job of archiving with our website. There's tons of information from projects and installations that we have done over the past decade. So, if you are looking for any of these projects that we spoke about today, please go on-

RASHEEDAH

BlackQuantumFuturism.com, and then on there you will see different links to some of our projects. Community Futures Lab has its own website, FuturesLab.community. TimeZoneProtocols.space. We have Black Time Belt. We have Black Womxn Temporal. I like to create little sites for each of the projects as much as possible, um, so you can see some of those websites and explore through those projects.

CAMAE

Thank you so much. Once again, it's Camae Ayewa.

RASHEEDAH

Rasheedah Phillips.

CAMAE

From Black Quantum Futurism. And shout out London. Thank you so much.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurism

MINE

Thank you to Black Quantum Futurism for this episode.

MARTIN

For the transcript of this episode and for resources mentioned in the conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool.com/podcast. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description wherever you're listening right now. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic.

Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary, and it's hosted on our website. If you'd like to get in touch with us, email us on info@rosechoreographicschool.com. This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. The series is produced and edited by Hester Cant, curated by Mine Kaplangi, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Bibliography:

Transition Sounds:

Temporal Atonement by Black Quantum Futurisms

Work by Black Quantum Futurisms:

Black Quantum Futurism

BQF - AfroFuturist Affair

BQF - Black Womxn Temporal

BQF - Time Zone Protocols

BQF - Theory and Practice (book)

BFQ - Community Futurisms (book)

BFQ - Community Futurisms Lab

BFQ - Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt