afropolis2023 Participants

For this third edition of AFROPOLIS we are primarily concerned with two sides of the same coin; one is the amount of innovation and creativity involved in retreating from the world and metaphorically putting to death what has previously been decreed to be nothing, an empty figure relegated to the outermost fringe of reality. The other is the way these negated subjects - deprived of power or visibility - pushed even further away, to the other side; crafting aesthetics or technologies to prolong their own annihilation. We are going Out Of This World as part of the invited art practices at the 2023 La Biennale de Lyon, bringing together a crop of mind bending international artistes-diviners, designers, technologists, and thinkers for an Afrofuturist adventure that is set against the backdrop of our current existential conditions.

Afropolis is proposing an antidisciplinary co-laboratory, inside a time-based sonic and scenographic installation, a ghostly space that is acting on us and activated by us. Central to this proposition is The Oraqu, an oracular program we’ve designed based on the ifa divination system of the Yorubas; a standardised binary-based protocol adapted for organizing, processing, and retrieving vast information within a dynamic oral knowledge database of the Yoruba cosmogony. The Oraqu is a self divinatory system by the querent, without recourse to any human agency, an intuitive repository of oral wisdom and sonic beauties, an archive of the ghosts, for seekers who are dissatisfied with easy answers and popular prejudices.

In association with a core team of collaborators and students of ENSATT - Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, a technical theatre school in Lyon -  we shall be imagineering a corresponding set design, a physical manifestation of The Afropolis, inside which we shall curate a fine selection of creative misfits; The Tribe of 2023, with whom we shall occupy this space for two weeks, creatively and collectively responding and adding to both the sonic archive as well as the already established multiverse, to culminate with a performance weekend experience, that will accommodate both the audience and artists as active participants. This will present a vast arena for the interplay of thoughts, soundscapes, body intelligence and digital art, a dynamic world of movements in flux, an invitation for these misfits to collectively contemplate the present with the audience in real time, and be entangled in a brief moment of what remains a fundamentally unknowable reality.

During three weeks, at the Usine Fagor, divergent creative practices will collide. The week zero will see members of the QDance Company Lagos along with associate students from ENSATT work together in bringing about a physical maker space delibrately imagineered for diverse creatives to gather with their audience. The first week thereafter, is open strictly to embodied experts; dancers, circus artists, or actors, with a morning session Master Class led by Qudus Onikeku. The afternoon periods for afropolis co-Lab; a co-reation space among the various performers to collaborate, to experiment and workshop new ideas. In the second and final week, they shall be joined by all other creative misfits who comes to add an additional layer on all that is already in the space. All these will be presented during the final weekend to professional and amateur audiences alike, with all sorts of public presentations; performance, concerts, multimedia installation, video + a closing dance party.

Visit afropolis.org/manifesto23 to read more.