An eviction notice and a clock do not seem to belong in the same artistic argument until one asks who controls the time they measure. A tenant may have days to leave. A developer may describe a neighborhood’s replacement as inevitable progress. An archive may preserve the building but not the people who lived there. In Philadelphia, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips have made work that asks what a community might do with its own past and future when the official timetable offers so little room. Their collaboration, Black Quantum Futurism, treats time as something people experience, dispute and make together.
The pair’s own account of their practice connects quantum physics and Afrodiasporic understandings of time, space, ritual, text and sound. Phillips is a writer, artist and housing advocate; Ayewa is a musician, poet and visual artist whose separate recordings appear as Moor Mother. Together, they have moved through books, sound, installations, workshops and public spaces as Black Quantum Futurism. Their Community Futures Lab gave neighbors a place to contribute their own accounts of what might happen next. A later exhibition in Nuremberg used objects as familiar as clocks and radios to disturb the idea that everyone lives by a single schedule.
The scale of these projects differs, yet they share a question. Who gets to define a future for a place, and who is permitted to leave evidence of it? The collective’s name may suggest a remote theoretical system. Its materials are often close to daily life: a conversation, a recording booth, a map, a plant, a room in which visitors notice time passing. The aim is not to replace a difficult present with a fantasy in which all problems have been solved. It is to make the mechanisms that narrow a community’s possible futures available for examination and change.
A future in a North Philadelphia room
From May 2016 to April 2017, Ayewa and Phillips operated Community Futures Lab at 2204 Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia’s Sharswood area. The project’s own record describes a temporary community space, gallery, resource and zine library, workshop space, recording booth and time capsule. These components matter because the lab was more than a themed exhibition. A library holds material people can return to. A recording booth gives an account a voice. A workshop creates time for the makers and visitors to think together. The physical address located those activities in a neighborhood undergoing redevelopment rather than in an abstract territory called “the future.”
The project gathered oral histories and what the collective calls oral futures. In a Science History Institute interview, Phillips describes the latter as future memories, possibilities that have not yet become events but can be spoken and shared. The phrase changes the ordinary position of a person being interviewed. They are not only a witness to what an institution has decided is already over. They can describe what they want, fear, imagine or expect, and that account can enter a communal record. The future is treated as a subject on which residents have knowledge.
That does not mean a recorded wish becomes a guaranteed outcome. The project’s strength lies in refusing to let a forecast made by an outside authority be the only version available. Redevelopment documents often describe future housing and streets while keeping the memories and priorities of existing residents to one side. Community Futures Lab put recollection beside projection. Its archive could hold stories about what had happened and accounts of what might happen, letting neighbors see both kinds of statement as part of the place’s public life.
The Lab’s own website calls the project an accessible time capsule, built from shared memories and stories. Accessibility here has a practical meaning. It was a room with resources and a recording space, not just a digital archive available to people with the right device or login. Phillips later explained to the Science History Institute that the initial funded physical space lasted a year, while the relationships and a modified version of the work continued elsewhere. That distinction keeps the project’s duration honest. A temporary room can make enduring connections without becoming a permanent institution.
The relation between Ayewa’s and Phillips’s practices gives the project another texture. Ayewa has described Phillips’s earlier time-travel stories as the occasion for the pair’s first collaboration, with Ayewa contributing a soundscape. Phillips’s housing work brought another vocabulary of time, one shaped by deadlines, displacement and the ways policy can make a household’s future suddenly precarious. In a 2021 interview with WHYY, Phillips connected her work with people losing their homes to the need for tools with which communities could imagine alternatives. Neither sound nor legal work is treated as an illustration for the other. They bring different kinds of knowledge into the shared experiment.
The collective’s project also changes what an archive is asked to do. A conventional archive can preserve evidence after a community has been altered, often without giving the community power over the alteration. Community Futures Lab used recording and collection while the neighborhood’s future remained contested. Its materials could register people as participants in that contest. The invitation to imagine was not a demand for optimism. The same account could contain a cherished memory and a fear about what a construction project would erase. A future becomes more precise when the people likely to live in it can describe its costs.
The work of unlearning a timeline
Black Quantum Futurism’s account of time is intentionally wider than a single neighborhood. On its artist site, the collective rejects a simple separation among past, present and future. Phillips has also said that ways of measuring and experiencing time are cultural, and that a supposedly universal schedule may express the priorities of a particular society. These ideas can sound abstract until one returns to the Lab. A deadline is not merely a neutral number on a page if it determines whether a family can stay in a home. A map of redevelopment is not only an image of a future if it begins to change what can be built and who can afford to remain.
The pair use the language of science fiction without requiring everybody who enters a workshop to learn a scientific theory first. In an extended conversation with Red Bull Music Academy, Ayewa described the collaboration’s early books and zines, including work on nonlocality and time. She also challenged the idea that only people holding certain degrees could think about physics, mathematics or technology. The provocation is not a claim that any metaphor can substitute for scientific evidence. It is an assertion that imaginative and communal practices can ask meaningful questions about time without waiting for permission from an institution.
That approach also explains the collective’s relation to Afrofuturism. In a first-person interview, Ayewa described Black Quantum Futurism as an offshoot with an emphasis on healing, memory and justice. The added word “quantum” is not a promise that the artwork demonstrates a laboratory finding. It points to an alternative to a single straight route from past to future. The works let different times act upon each other: an ancestor’s account, a present threat to housing, an imagined life in a safer neighborhood. Their interaction can change what a person thinks is possible now.
This is a more demanding ambition than placing a Black figure in a futuristic city and calling the image liberating. The Lab asked what residents could actually contribute to a record of their place. The answer required equipment, staff time, trust, a location and enough continuity for a neighbor to return. That practical infrastructure is part of the artwork. If a future is imagined only by those already able to fund and publish it, the field of possibility narrows before the picture is drawn. Ayewa and Phillips gave other voices a place in the process of making it.
A clock in Nuremberg
In 2025 Black Quantum Futurism presented Bending the Arrow of Time into a Circle at Kunstverein Nürnberg. The institution describes four zones using locally sourced mirrors, plants, radios, clocks and fountains, alongside new sound and video by the collective. The materials are notable for their ordinary associations. A clock can organize work; a radio can bring distant voices into a room; a mirror reflects the viewer’s position; a fountain gives a rhythm without the neat divisions of a dial. The exhibition did not ask visitors to look at a single picture of tomorrow. It arranged conditions in which time might be perceived differently.
The venue’s account places the work in relation to colonialism, racism, community and resilience. It also describes an outdoor sculpture near a housing complex, intended as a meeting point for residents and their contributions. The surrounding neighborhood was therefore part of the project’s geography, not just the audience for an indoor installation. Memories and thoughts from people living nearby were invited into the work’s setting. The artists extended the exhibition’s temporal questions into a space where everyday routines and neighborly encounters already occurred. Visitors could meet the work near the housing complex rather than enter a gallery first.
The Nuremberg project had a specific historical reference. The institution connects it to Leon Howard Sullivan, the American pastor and activist who established Progress Aerospace Enterprises, a Black space venture, in 1968. In this setting, a name from the history of space ambition enters a room of local objects and conversations. The relation is less like a museum timeline than a test of proximity. What does a past attempt to claim a future in aerospace offer people thinking about control of time and space in the present city? The exhibition gives that question material company instead of treating Sullivan as a decorative emblem.
Kunstverein Nürnberg also credits separate music installations by Ayewa, working as Moor Mother, with invited musicians. Those performances sit beside the joint exhibition while retaining Ayewa’s individual authorship and the musicians’ contributions. The exhibition’s public record makes the distinction visible. The collective’s argument for shared possibility becomes more concrete when the people and their separate responsibilities remain named.
The four zones bring the earlier Lab into sharper focus. In Philadelphia, a recording booth let residents give future memories an audible form. In Nuremberg, a clock and a radio made time’s habits physically present, while the outside meeting point widened the exhibition into the neighborhood. One project emphasized gathering testimony; the other emphasized arranging encounters among objects, sound and people. Neither one claims to have changed a city simply because an exhibition existed. Each makes a limited but tangible opening in the systems by which a city speaks about its own future.
The question carried outward
The collective has not treated Community Futures Lab as a one-time prototype. Its own CV records Community Futures Lab Chicago in 2019, alongside further exhibitions, films, books, sound projects and community interventions. A list of venues would miss the point. What changes from place to place is the relation between an artistic form and the people whose memories or plans it addresses. A time capsule built in North Philadelphia cannot simply be installed elsewhere with all its meaning intact. Its questions can travel; its answers have to be situated.
The partnership also resists a familiar separation between care and experiment. A room with neighbors telling stories might be dismissed as social service, while an installation about time might be granted the status of advanced art. Black Quantum Futurism uses both forms. Its work with residents gives speculative language a concrete audience and responsibility. Its sound, images and constructed spaces prevent that work from being reduced to a policy consultation. The two modes press on each other, making each more exacting.
The name’s final word, futurism, can sound like a promise to move away from what exists. Ayewa and Phillips repeatedly bring the inquiry back to people who are here. A resident’s recorded future memory has no value if it is detached from the conditions of their life. A clock in a gallery does more than mark minutes when placed beside a history of who controls labor, housing and the right to stay. These artworks turn time from an unquestioned background into a visible material. Once its terms can be seen and discussed, they may also be contested.
There is no single image of liberation that follows. A collective archive remains incomplete. A room eventually closes. An exhibition ends. The artists’ claim is more durable than the life of any one venue: people can practice making and keeping a future in common, even when official schedules are moving against them. Black Quantum Futurism’s work gives that practice forms one can enter, hear, contribute to and carry away. The clock does not disappear. Its authority becomes a question.