DORTMUND.- The exhibition Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention, curated by Inke Arns and Fabian Saavedra-Lara, puts Afrofuturism in dialogue with alternative technological solutions and imaginations. The speculative narratives unfolding in the artworks on display are confronted with actual inventions from maker scenes in different African countries. This creates a double shift of perspective: While the artworks project decidedly African and diasporic sci-fi visions, the real devices appear as evidence of a technological development that is already underway. The exhibition thus presents Africa as a continent of technological innovation.

The exhibition Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention curated by Inke Arns and Fabian Saavedra-Lara shows 20 international artistic positions and 12 tech projects from the maker scenes in various countries of Africa.

The starting point for this project was a research trip undertaken by Inke Arns through various African countries in 2014; one which drew her attention to the maker scene and the new technological devices, apps, software solutions and digital products that have been coming into being for some years now against the background of increasing digitisation and networking on the continent. Many of these inventions have the goal of helping the community of users in everyday life and compensating for infrastructural problems. They often function according to principles of general accessibility and open source, which allow changes in design, repurposing and continuing development. They thus represent an alternative draft to the technological monocultures of the "global North" that dominate here.

The inventions presented in the exhibition appear as proofs of an already initiated technological development that could lead to a future not limited to the narrative of modernity and progress of the West – a future that is already shown to us now in excerpts by the artistic works in the exhibition. The artistic media used are videos, video installations, photography, drawings, records, software, sculptures and comics.

The 32 participating artists and tech projects come from 22 countries: Egypt, Angola, Australia, Germany, Benin, France, Ghana, the United Kingdom, Italy, Cameroon, Canada, Kenya, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Spain, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, the USA and the planet Saturn.

Exhibition topics
Important reference points of many of the artistic works in the exhibition are the jazz musician Sun Ra, Afrofuturism in general and the myth of Drexciya in particular.

Sun Ra
One of the most important and well-known representatives of Afrofuturism is the avant garde jazz musician Herman Blount (1914-1993), who reinvented himself as the art figure Sun Ra from the planet Saturn. His entire body of musical work is permeated by a variety of future narratives about outer space and interstellar journeys from an Afro-American perspective. For Sun Ra, outer space is an idyll, in which racism and discrimination can be overcome and where all people can find space for their own narrative, thus empower themselves and be free. For him, the future isn't possible without considering the past. With Sun Ra, this Afrofuturist concept expresses itself in numerous references to the realm of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt as a symbol for the cultural hegemony of the African continent lost through colonialism and in the diaspora. These references are found, for example, in his nom de plume (Ra is the Egyptian sun god) and in many costumes and stage decorations. In Afrofuturism, the future is thus not viewed as linear (like in Western science fiction), but instead as circular.

Drexciya
The Detroit techno duo Drexciya developed imaginary worlds inspired by Afrofuturism in many concept albums. In their releases, Drexciya is also the name of a legendary city beneath the sea. This "Afrofuturist Atlantis" is populated by the descendants of pregnant women that were taken as slaves from various countries of Africa and thrown overboard and murdered during the crossing of the Atlantic. According to the legend, their unborn children survived in the womb and developed the ability to breathe and live underwater. They founded an unknown underwater civilization that was in possession of utopian technologies.

Afrofuturism in popular culture
Besides Sun Ra and the Detroit techno duo Drexciya, there have been and still are many artists since the mid-20th century who have delved into Afrofuturist concepts and aesthetics in popular culture. Sun Ra's ideas and performance practice, for example, influenced a large number of artists in techno and in current electronic club music (e.g. Flying Lotus), in hip-hop and in contemporary R&B (e.g. Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe). There are also autonomous comparable developments in other parts of the world that deal with diasporan visions of the future from the perspective of black communities, and which, thanks to the use and adoption of new technologies of producing, for example, the studio and multi-channel mixing board in the case of dub in Jamaica, can create futurist tracks (e.g. Lee "Scratch" Perry).