What would an archive liberated from the shackles of the past look like? An archive liberated from the limited boundaries of words, museums and dusty boxes, in which the multiplicity of African narratives is set free from the stereotypical, oppressive paradigm of backwardness and the modernist 'hypertrophy of the present'?1 We long for the emancipation of paradigms; for the moment when our art manages to live up to its speculative capacity. We long for a time when liberation will mean the full expression of the richness of our potential. We are now affirming the conditional; the exploration of the future is not so far-fetched, but intimately linked to the past and present.2 African Futurism started as a movement and a philosophy, but has evolved to reflect the broader necessity to shift the hierarchical cultural paradigm in general.
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