Camilla Wellton has never kept her futures in one room. The French Caribbean and Swedish designer began with clothes, where a seam could change the space a wearer occupied. She later dressed performers for John-Paul Zaccarini’s FutureBrownSpace, made electronic music as GYNDROID, wrote fiction, built the I AWAKE book universe and founded two institutions concerned with what people might become.
Her Afrofuturism is unusually interested in the ordinary body. She does not ask it to disappear into a machine or a shining uniform. In her fashion, it moves. In her books, it notices, chooses and returns. In the Swedish Institute of Inner Technology, the question grows public: what human capacities must we cultivate while AI becomes more capable? Its taxonomy names 45 capacities in nine families. At the Sensual Institute, she presses another point: sensual means being in contact with one’s senses and life, not merely being sexual or erotic.
Wellton describes herself as an Afrofuturist. Her practice gives the word a material argument. A future can be imagined in a novel, scored in music, cut into a garment and built into the way a reader speaks with a book. It becomes worthwhile when people can still feel and judge for themselves inside it.
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Camilla Wellton: The Future Has a Body
