Nicolas Premier shares his transmedia film series which questions the the african and afro-diasporic experience
Africa is the Future is about cycles. The life and death cycle and the cycle our consciousness constantly goes through from Imaginary to reality and back, what begets what we are experiencing.
It is also about another cycle, that of my creative process. In a way, this film brings to a close a corpus of works I initiated in the aftermaths of 9/11 to interrogate the global narrative and at the same time, it lays the foundations for a new unfolding.
Over this work, it appeared to me very clear that African and Afro-Diasporic knowledge and experiences both tell the genesis of Modernity from a crucial perspective and contain trails to overcome its deadly impasses. It seems like their taking into account is a sine qua non condition to give birth to the future.
The Mishkin Gallery NYC curator, Alaina Claire Feldman, gave the film a succinct summary and I would like to include it in full:
“Africa is the Future is a film in four parts and countless years in the making. While nonlinear, and appropriating the cycle of the Kongo Cosmogram, the film begins with the story of the Portuguese Misericordia, a ship that in 1532 experienced a Kongolese slave rebellion and then mysteriously disappeared at sea. Tracing first the slave routes throughout the Atlantic, mapped over by the first telegraphs and to today’s undersea fiber optic cables, a network between three continents and their dependency on racial capitalism, on slavery, imperialism and dispossession begins to appear.
“Each movement is framed by a piercing blue, the color of the ocean and early computer monitoring software, which is enmeshed in a graded portal, a sort of technocratic black hole to the unknown. Premier uses his own footage and those appropriated from African and American popular culture, as well as his native France – clips of sports, films, news, documentaries and interviews – spliced together in what Premier calls four “movements”. Each week, a new movement is released.”
