In celebration of Black History Month, New York’s Carnegie Hall will launch its 2022 Afrofuturism Festival on Saturday (Feb. 12) with a live, headlining performance from Grammy Award-winning rapper-producer, filmmaker and composer Flying Lotus.
With innovative festivities lined up through April 3, the citywide and multi-dimensional commemoration is complete with more than 80 live and virtual events — including visual arts and technology exhibitions, film screenings and panel discussions that will be presented by more than 70 partnering cultural institutions (including the iconic Apollo Theater, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, The National Black Theatre and The Africa Center).
In the coming weeks, musical performances will be delivered by: Sun Ra Arkestra with Kelsey Lu and Moor Mother; Nicole Mitchell and Angel Bat Dawid; Chimurenga Renaissance and Fatoumata Diawara; the Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble and Theo Croker.
Billboard caught up with opening act Flying Lotus and Carnegie Hall’s esteemed director of festivals and special projects, Adriaan Fuchs (who hails from South Africa) just days before showtime. The pair opened up about the significance of Afrofuturism and the importance of the Afrofuturism Festival.
“With each of the festivals we do at Carnegie Hall, we rely on external advisors to provide us with the expertise in terms of artists we should be booking and partnering organizations that should be involved,” Fuchs explains. “We turned to a team of five incredible Afrofuturism advisors — Reynaldo Anderson, King James Britt, Louis Chude-Sokei, Sheree Renée Thomas, and Ytasha L. Womack — and they have been shaping this festival for the last two years.”
“Plans got derailed because of the pandemic,” he admits. “But we really wanted to include both legacy artists that have been at the forefront of Afrofuturism and the new torch bearers of the genre.”
For multi-hyphenate creative Flying Lotus, who’s set to direct his second feature film Ash later this year, Saturday night’s concert couldn’t arrive at a better time in his career: “With where my music is heading currently, this feels very appropriate.”
“[Carnegie Hall] is a different atmosphere for the things I’ve been doing and it’s an opportunity for me to move in a new direction musically that is fitting,” he continues. “I have so much music in my catalog that I couldn’t play at a normal music festival because people want to dance and party. With this, everyone will be sitting down, so it will fall into more of a cerebral experience.”
Of the more than 80 festival events, Fuchs notes he’s especially looking forward to the online Afrofuturist Writing discussion between award-winning authors Samuel R. Delany and Namwali Serpell, moderated by Smaran Dayal. Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America will host the occasion.
Also noteworthy: Brooklyn’s National Sawdust music venue will anchor an immersive listening experience of an unreleased album by late Jamaican singer and producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, known for his immense contributions to the development of dub music in the ‘70s. “That’s gonna be an amazing experience for followers of Lee,” says Fuchs. “With Afrofuturism being so multidisciplinary and highly creative, we wanted to have a range of offerings that touch on everything from music to literacy, fashion and technology.”
“It’s gonna be fun… I’m there to explore music and have a good time,” Flying Lotus affirms, also joking, “The only thing that’s kind of tricky is it’s my first time really outside in a while. I’ve just been hanging out with my dog, so to be thrust in front of a whole bunch of people will be quite a jarring experience. But I’ll get a kick out of it.”
Teasing his special set, Lotus says he’s most excited to collaborate onstage with instrumentalists Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Brandee Younger, whom he describes as “two really amazing musicians who are gonna do things I have no idea [about]. The improvisation and things that can only happen in the moment are what I’m looking forward to the most.”
The filmmaker, who defines Afrofutirism as “the expression of concepts that are born in Blackness” says, “We’re just now starting to see Black people in mainstream science-fiction because for so long its’s been a mystery of where we belong in the future. They barely show us in space and it’s taken so long, but because of that, Afrofuturism exists. Thankfully, we’ve created our own future, universes and mythologies that are part of the culture.”
Fuchs underscores Flying Lotus’s sentiments, adding that, “[Historically], everything was done from a white perspective and through a white gaze excluding Black people as being central to the story. Afrofuturism represents imagining futures and alternate realities where race relations played out differently while linking back to Africa and the past. It’s that combination of storytelling, creativity, artistic expression and technology coming together.”
Ultimately, he says that “at Carnegie Hall, we want to take audiences on a journey. The festivals allow us to take a deep dive through musical presentations and other programming with cultural and academic institutions for New Yorkers and everyone. Afrofuturism is now part of the mainstream and we’re acknowledging it as an incredible cultural practice and movement.”
Learn more about the Afrofuturism Festival at Carnegie Hall’s official website.