This 2-week intensive invited students to collaborate across departments to design and perform a new ritual, creating the garment or talisman needed to bring it to life. Ultimately the students of Laba Douala took their ideas a giant leap further, constructing entire new worlds, replete with their own ceremonies and cosmologies. What is the future if not the world we build together?
We started the course by analyzing our personal definitions of words like “technology” and “ritual,” trying to find examples that blurred the lines or created controversy as a way of understanding what factors are important to us about these phenomena. We learned about Afrofuturism and began experimenting hands-on with electronic + radio technologies as creative tools. We also studied rituals from both our personal lives and our cultural traditions, before finally setting out in groups to each design a new ritual, including designing and fabricating garments, gestures, and objects to bring it to life. We asked ourselves, what does a ritual do? And then, what can a garment do? How can we design garments or objects that tell us what they want us to do with them (affordances) or which actively participate in creating meaning?
The original themes for these final rituals were created in response to ideas that came up often the first week of class, although each group then elaborated them further: the feeling of belonging, the importance of working with reused + upcycled materials, a hope for women to feel more empowered to imagine their own future, the storytelling role of garments. Students also had the option to propose an independent project inspired by the ideas of Afrofuturism, technology, and ritual.
Held in the dry season 2024 (January/February), this course was designed + taught by jenny filipetti, made possible thanks to the support of CHROMAKAIROS and LABA DOUALA.
Fabric circuits
During the first week of class we built paper-based electronics circuits and began working with NFC (near field communications) radio technology. The pieces you see below are our answers to “What Does the Afrofuture Say?” Students had a single afternoon to design + create a workbook cover from found materials that in some way represented their ideas about the (Afro)future or relationship to the themes of Afrofuturism.
The title of this mini-project is an homage to Ingrid LaFleur, a USA-born, South Africa -based artist + curator who led a series of virtual interviews during the coronavirus pandemic called What Does the Afrofuture Say?
Images created by Jenny Filipetti, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal