Black Quantum Futurism: Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips

This episode is a conversation with Black Quantum Futurism, an interdisciplinary practice founded by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother). Their work brings together quantum physics with Afrodiasporic 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 visual artist whose practice moves across sound, performance, and collaboration.Working with Camae and Rasheedah has been deeply formative for Mine Kaplangı, the curator of this episode. Their work shaped the programme 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 programme. 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.A full transcript of this episode and links to further resources, including Black Quantum Futurism’s work and writings, can be found on our website.This episode is part of a mini-series, Choreographing the Apocalypse, which is guest curated by Mine Kaplangı, a Folkestone-based curator and art mediator from Istanbul. It forms part of their ongoing research into queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypse(s). They will be inviting artists, thinkers, and somatic practitioners to explore apocalyptic thinking through speculative world-building and radically intimate frameworks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.