Research Network: Predictions, Projections and Speculations

Join us for a night of performances, as artist Ebony Francis alongside duo Alexandrina Hemsley & Seke Chimuntenwende explore and destabilise Afrofuturist explorations of time in order to provoke critical questions around existence, identity and erasure.

“Consuming My Way To The Black Future With My Afro Intact”

As Diary of a Black Tree, artist Ebony Francis performs her desire to exist in a future which always seems to elude her representationally. She travels into issues of the black body via text, framed and re-framed in words limited to straight lines and small white boxes. She compositions the past in the present; she attempts to become Afrofuturism itself.

Age of the Forgetful Galaxies

As part of their continuing collaboration, Seke Chimutenwende and Alexandrina Hemsley will read from their text being developed for a new work, Black Holes. The pair will utilise Afrofuturism’s capacity for provocative fiction to recount an origin story of The Big Bang. They relentlessly orbit this initial site of birth/destruction while transforming autobiographical elements of their lived experiences into material. This re-location of knowledge and history generates a collective process of imagining with the audience.  

Seke Chimutengwende works in dance as a performer, choreographer and teacher. As a performer he has worked with companies such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Lost Dog and Fabulous Beast. For his company Seke Chimutengwende & Friends he has choreographed four works including The Time Travel Piece for The Place Prize 2012 and King Arthur, which premiered at The Yard Theatre in 2015. Seke is currently researching a new group piece exploring the relationship between political revolutions and artistic revolutions called Mass, Material and Disturbance.

Alexandrina Hemsley is a dance artist and writer making work that aims to reclaim her identity as a mixed-race woman and tries to engage with the various cultural frameworks that mark her body on her own terms. Her practice is frequently interdisciplinary and Alexandrina is one part of duo Project O with Jamila Johnson-Small and she works with Helena Webb & Rosie Heafford on Dad Dancing. Alexandrina has also collaborated with artist Katarzyna Perlak on photograph series Bounty Bars & Oreo Cookies. Her writing practice finds its home on Feminist Shakedown.

Ebony Francis (www.diaryofablacktree.london) approaches her practice under the premise that all of her work is ostensibly all about her, externalized and internalized through the various environments to which she belongs. This work is her “diary”. Often she uses her own body or other bodies or “things” that she feels can describe or represent her. Dabbling in photographic collage, film, installation and performance art she incorporates all of her education, learning, development and many years of travel, work and connections made around the world. Driven by the black body politic she centers on themes including racial identity, cultural imperialism and heritage.