Paper short abstract:

Mônica de Miranda's installation "Path to the Stars" and the Memorial António Agostinho Neto is discussed via metaphors of terrestriality and flight in Angolan Independence-era imagery and discourse.

Paper long abstract:

The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in Luanda, Angola is an enormous structure that people there call a “rocketship.” Made out of concrete and in enormous proportions, it has elements of late Soviet architecture that have often been read as folly in its context. Unlike Soviet architecture, the Neto Mausoleum doesn’t house a television tower, concert hall, or airport, but a deceased poet who wrote of the “path of the stars” being via land and its animal inhabitants. Neto is, as it were, interred in a structure that is both bound to the land and seeks to depart from it. Neto’s poem, which inspired the monument’s design, uses metaphor as a departure from the immanence of language, much as the astronaut was a metaphor of departure. Africa’s “terrestriality” was most recently taken up in Monica de Miranda’s installation at a collateral exhibition to the 2022 Venice Biennale called “Path to the Stars.” It features a film that follows a woman freedom fighter in the Angolan war who boats up the Kwanza River. The river, as it does in Alfredo Jaar’s Muxima (2005) is metaphoricity: a traversing of language that acts to link sites of meaning with flights of interpretation. Two women recur throughout, one draped in fatigues (technology of war) and the other in a space suit (technology of information). The characters’ use of prose throughout the film gives us further insight to the function of terrestriality and flight in Independence-era imagery and discourse.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the work of Kinshasa-based artist collective Kongo Astronauts and their contemporary response to the ongoing impact of the Jet Age and the Space Age on people and land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Paper long abstract:

Both the Jet Age and the Space Race significantly impacted the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, as Congolese uranium and cobalt were critical elements in the advancement of air and spacecraft engines, and remain so today. This paper considers the work of the Kinshasa-based artist collective Kongo Astronauts and their contemporary response to the ongoing impact of these periods on people and land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Kongo Astronauts work across disciplines, media, political borders, restrictive artistic and cultural boundaries, and temporal thresholds to reimagine our shared futures and elicit thoughts of refusal and renewal. By remixing and repurposing quotidian objects and words, Kongo Astronauts give life to new visual elements and linguistic creations that are fantastical in their presentation while remaining grounded in the reality of life in Kinshasa.

Through a detailed visual analysis of work from a recent solo exhibition titled Congo Gravitational Waves: A Metadigital and Tantalean Tale and curated by the author, this paper explores how Kongo Astronauts grapple with the lingering effects of the Jet and Space Ages in their communities. The paper examines, in particular, their series After Schengen, which features an astronaut photographed inside several abandoned jumbo jets situated in the sprawling Parc de la Vallée de la Nsele, and one of their "spacewalker" suits constructed using e-waste containing minerals mined in the DRC and used for public performances as a way to raise questions about the crises of late capitalism and climate change.

Paper short abstract:

The paper uses space travel as a frame of enquiry, to reinforce the claim for speculative nonconformity in the work of contemporary Zambian artists. It situates aspirations for travel into outer space being nothing new, drawing reference from Mukuka Nkoloso’s Space Programme of the 1960s.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on using both space travel and science fiction as mechanisms, or rather frames of enquiry, to position not only speculative futures, but to reinforce the claim for speculative nonconformity in the work of Zambian artists for the purpose of arguing against African belatedness. It examines to what degree and in what ways metaphors of space travel and science fiction can be used in artistic portrayals that go beyond simplistic tropes and the escalating trends that suggest revived Afrofuturism, in order to delink from Western notions of time and space not only in relation to the arts of Africa. The paper contends that through the analysis of works such as those by Stary Mwaba, Mwenya Kabwe and Milumbe Haimbe that posit Space Travel or images of the Afronaut as central to their thematic content, these artists make bold statements that counter perceptions of Africa as backward. Correspondingly, their works reference the past and stake claims for African life in the future. Furthermore, an analysis of the works in this chapter has at least tried to challenge occidental approaches that limit the framework of the speculative to Western science, technology and philosophy. It makes an attempt to avoid alternative speculative cultural worldviews that may in a way continue to bolster a system where Euro-America, or indeed the global West assumes the hegemonic position with all other participants in science fiction, for instance, being participants of a restrained or conformed perspective.

Paper short abstract:

Sun Ra and his Arkestra explored outerspace through music as a literal means of space travel. As most their international concerts were taking place in Europe, the rare visits on the African continent become even more meaningful when approaching an understanding of Sun Ra’s relations to Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Sun Ra’s defining era in the late 50s and 60s, with the founding of the independent label Saturn Records and its subsequent numerous releases under the varying names of the Sun Ra’s Arkestra, is closely tied to the era of the space race. In 1962, John F. Kennedy extended his new frontier onto space in his “Moon Speech” as yet another final frontier. Sun Ra’s outerspace explorations were already taking off in 1954, when he founded his rehearsal band as a means to explore the infinite cosmos through music as a means of space travel. While taking his name from Egyptian mythology, and having a deep engagement with African music traditions and African references in song titles such as “Ancient Ethiopia” (first released in 1959), Sun Ra did not understand himself to be African-American, neither African, nor belonging to the category of human altogether, but to the angel race hailing from Saturn. Sun Ra and the Arkestra visited Egypt for the first time in 1971. They participated in the third Pan-African festival FESTAC ’77 as part of the American section, which brought figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Audre Lorde on the same airplane together to Lagos, Nigeria. Focusing on these rare visits to Africa offers insights into one of Afrofuturism’s pioneering figures’ relation to Africa and in that sense grapple with what might be termed the African question of said concept.