afropolis2023 Lunch

During two weeks, at the Usine Fagor, divergent creative practices will collide. The first week is open strictly to professional performers; dancers, circus artists, actors or musicians, with a morning session Master Class led by Qudus Onikeku. The afternoon periods for afropolis co-Lab; a maker space among the various performers to collaborate, to experiment and workshop new ideas. In the second 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 creatively. All these will be presented during the final weekend to professional and amateur audiences alike, with all sorts of public presentations; performance, concerts, multimedia art, video + a closing DJ dance party.

For this third edition we are going Out Of This World, as part of the invited art practices at the 2023 La Biennale de Lyon  We are 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 conditions; climate terrorisms, viral pandemics, lingering ghosts of colonialism, the incessant threat of a nuclear war, complex matrixes of racial, patriarchal, capitalist and technofascist oppressions. 

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. 

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 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…

Visit afropolis.org/manifesto23 to read more.