Considering Afrofuturism and the Built Environment
Abstract
As Angela Pastorelli-Sosa demonstrates in her essay on artist Sydney Cain in this volume, Afrofuturism centers Blackness and Black experiences while sharpening the contours of our imaginations by bridging different temporal planes. Pastorelli-Sosa indicates that Afrofuturism is a powerful tool for an artist’s imagination, and is used to wade into the possibilities of multiple futures and pasts. She artfully demonstrates this feature of Afrofuturism by highlighting how Cain’s spiritual labor allows for new experiences and engagements with the present and the past. Through the process of material extraction, Cain’s drawings become a channel for ancestral intervention. They pull an “invisibilized” people from the past, allowing them to surface in a present landscape, thereby altering our understanding and relationship with space and time.