MDes Open Project: Black Counter-Cartographies and The Futures of Time

Black temporalities within zones of extraction are marked by the imposition of delay, which pushes people and spaces outside the regulated, normative modernist temporal schedules and boundaries that structure social life. However, these temporalities are also promiscuous, precisely because the delay locates one in a liminal state of being. This form of temporal transgression, of being out of time (and place), creates a shift in spatial and temporal coordinates that repeatedly disrupt linear time, and hold open the possibility for a reorganization or manipulation of time and the enactment of diverse spatialities and futures in the immediate present.

This open project builds on creative spatial research on counter-cartographies and aesthetics of circulation, extraction and black temporalities and the after-lives of extraction undertaken in African Mobilities – a trans-national design and urbanism platform. Beginning with creative counter-cartographies of extraction presented in a range of visual artists and designers projects, we will explore how speculative research, infrastructures and spatial strategies might serve as “imaginative ruptures” that refuse fixity and singularities, and that can hold space with greater depth, feeling, and complexity.

We will explore the ideas and spatial practices of various artists and designers that point to diverse possibilities for “Making time into space” (Kathryn Yusoff), and that create the possibility of territories and spaces that are “subterraneanly subversive of its surface reality,” and explore whether this can be translated into a range of spatial strategies that might transform zones of precarity, economic and cultural exchange into a viable, liberator public domains.

Key words:
Extraction, Black temporalities, prototypes, speculative futures, remediation