A portable radio passes between women in Cauleen Smith's film Sojourner. It carries voices from other times into a present journey through places where people once built lives together. The device is familiar, almost modest, yet it changes the film's scale. A receiver can bring a distant voice into an intimate space; several listeners can hear it at once. Smith uses that shared act of attention to ask what a future might inherit from communities that have already tried to live otherwise.
Made in 2018, the twenty-two-minute film is one part of a larger practice spanning cinema, installation, textiles and objects. The Smithsonian American Art Museum describes a group of young women of colour moving through charged landscapes, carrying poetic banners and hearing messages from Black feminist and spiritual histories. In the film, the future is not a distant city rendered by special effects. It is a relationship among people, sites and words that have survived their original moment.
Smith is an African American filmmaker and artist born in Riverside, California. Her Smithsonian biography traces a career from experimental film into immersive installations and notes her sustained engagement with Black cultural figures and speculative forms. She has spoken carefully about the name Afrofuturism. In a 2012 interview, she called it a movement of music, literature and art rather than a fixed identity, and said that its ideas had helped her describe work she had already been making. Her films merit that reading because they make time, history and possible worlds active materials. They also test the category by asking how much of a future can be built without leaving the earth.
Places where a different life was practiced
In Sojourner, Smith does not invent a utopian settlement from scratch. She films sites linked to people who made forms of collective life under difficult conditions. Alice Coltrane's ashram in California, Noah Purifoy's desert art environment and the Watts Towers are among the places carried into the work. According to KADIST's account of the film, its trajectory also connects Rebecca Cox Jackson and other figures whose social and spiritual experiments crossed eras. The locations are not picturesque ruins used to suggest a vague lost golden age. Each has a history of someone acting on an idea.
Smith has explained this distinction herself. In a conversation with curator Allison Glenn, she argued that a successful utopia need not last forever. It must make collective empowerment possible and sustain people while it lives. That definition changes what a visitor should look for in Sojourner. The film does not need to prove that a community eliminated every contradiction. It can ask what its members made possible, how they organized care and what traces remain for another generation.
This approach makes the camera's journey investigative rather than nostalgic. A structure, garden or room can show signs of use, but it cannot narrate itself. Smith brings speech and music into relation with the filmed sites so that the viewer hears more than an architectural afterimage. The radio is crucial here. It makes transmission visible: words do not simply float over the footage as anonymous historical commentary; they arrive through an object that can be carried and held. The women listening become part of the work's account of how knowledge moves.
The film also resists the fantasy of a single heroic founder. Sites connected to named figures are visited by a collective of younger women, and the ideas they encounter come from many writers and makers. A future assembled this way is not the property of one visionary. It depends on attention to multiple, sometimes divergent histories. The women in the film are travelers, but they are also witnesses who give the places another public life by moving through them together.
The Whitney Museum's presentation of Mutualities places Sojourner beside Smith's 2017 film Pilgrim. The museum identifies writings by Sojourner Truth, the Combahee River Collective and Rebecca Cox Jackson among the currents running through these works, with Alice Coltrane's music in the soundtracks. A sequence that includes abolitionism, Black feminism, experimental music and spiritual practice cannot be flattened into one lineage. Smith's form depends on their coexistence: ideas from different times may illuminate one another without becoming the same thing.
The first journey was personal
Smith's relation to Alice Coltrane's community began before she knew it would become a film. She told Glenn that she visited the Sai Anantam Ashram in 2015 as an admirer of Coltrane's music. She heard a recording of a sermon, then the people present began to sing. They argued affectionately about how to sing particular songs and shared food afterward. These are Smith's reported memories of the visit, not a staged scene in Sojourner. They explain why the site interested her as a lived world rather than as a symbolic location on a map.
The ordinary details matter. Song can carry a tradition, but so can disagreement over a tune and hospitality after a gathering. Smith's stated interest was in the world Coltrane built for family and community, not only in the famous musician's records. The visit showed her a social form around the music. It offered evidence that an artist's vision can become a place where other people assemble and find room for themselves.
Later Smith went to Watervliet Shaker Village in New York while researching Rebecca Cox Jackson. She told Glenn that she brought a camera and encountered an enlarged photograph of a Black Shaker woman in a meeting house. The image gave her a sense that Jackson and Coltrane might have something to teach each other across time. Smith subsequently sought permission to film at the ashram when she learned that the land might be sold. Filmmaker Arthur Jafa volunteered as cinematographer; Smith says his 4K footage appears in Pilgrim while her 16mm footage appears in Sojourner. This is an important production credit and a formal distinction between the films.
The two gauges carry different textures, but the point is not to assign one to fact and one to dream. Both cameras record a place at risk of changing or disappearing. Their images become parts of two works made in relation to each other. Pilgrim can linger on the evidence of sites; Sojourner can assemble a journey that carries their possibilities forward. Smith told Living Content she dislikes the films being screened separately because they speak to each other. One asks what happened in specific places; the other tries to act with what might still be learned there.
That relationship gives her use of history precision. It is easy to say that a speculative film “reimagines the past.” Smith's method is more demanding. She visits, films, researches and listens, then builds a cinematic form in which the recorded sites can enter a new relation with living performers. The imagined future is answerable to actual places and to the people who occupied them.
A signal instead of a monument
The radio in Sojourner is a better emblem of Smith's method than a monument would be. A monument usually fixes a person to one place and invites viewers to come to it. A radio moves. It receives voices the listener cannot see and may invite a group to gather around a message. KADIST describes the radio as a recurring prop that transmits words of critique and inspiration, with the film ending in a feminist reimagining of a historical photograph at the Watts Towers. The act of listening changes who occupies the image.
Smith is interested in how pictures already in circulation shape what viewers imagine. In a 2020 interview, she said she increasingly wanted audiences to question what images do to them. She described leaving the edges of her films visible enough that a viewer remains aware of their construction. That principle helps explain why Sojourner is not merely a beautiful procession. Its costumes, banners, radio and carefully selected sites show how the image is assembled. The viewer can admire its force while asking where its voices came from.
The banners give words a public body. A statement printed or carried through a landscape is different from a line spoken in voiceover. It has a size, a direction and a group of people responsible for lifting it. In Smith's film, writing joins the movement of bodies, so that political language becomes something physically transported. The banners do not replace the locations' complicated histories with slogans. They mark a collective intention to carry those histories into another moment.
Alice Coltrane's music contributes another kind of transmission. The Whitney notes her sound as part of both Pilgrim and Sojourner. Music can fill the time between locations without explaining them away. It gives the travel a continuity that a map alone cannot provide. Coltrane's presence is therefore not a decorative cue that a scene is spiritual. Her music belongs to one of the communities Smith studied, and it makes that community audible in a work moving through other sites.
The film's visual future is also deliberately collective. Smith asks what happens when women carry messages between generations instead of waiting for a lone inventor or rescuer. A radio needs someone to broadcast and someone to listen; a banner needs hands to hold it; a journey requires companions. These forms make dependence visible. In Sojourner, interdependence is neither a weakness nor an idealized abstraction. It is the material through which any alternative world can be approached.
The room around the film
Smith did not stop at the edge of the screen. For the Whitney's Mutualities exhibition, she placed Pilgrim and Sojourner in different installation environments with another chamber between them. Her conversation with Living Content describes a journey through those three rooms: first encounter the sites, then move into an altered experience, then reach a synthesis in Sojourner. The architecture made a sequence that a viewer had to walk.
She calls some of these environments “space stations,” small capsules for viewers. A theatrical screening generally directs attention toward the image and asks the body to recede. Smith wants the body back in the encounter. She has described people settling onto a couch or taking off shoes when they notice a shag carpet. Such gestures can sound incidental, but they alter the terms of viewing. A person aware of the room, of other visitors and of their own comfort cannot be fully absorbed by the fiction of a distant world. The future is experienced as a social situation in the present.
At the Momentary's Space Station: Radiant Behind the Sun, Pilgrim and Sojourner played on alternating loops within an environment with a 1970s space-station feel. The era is not just a retro style. It recalls a period when science fiction, experimental music and liberation politics were imagining different routes ahead. Smith can use that historical visual language while directing visitors toward actual experiments in community. The station becomes a place to pause between journeys, not a capsule escaping the world below.
The wallpaper in these installations also works as more than atmosphere. Smith told Glenn that Shaker drawings of heavenly instruments entered a Chinoiserie wallpaper pattern associated with Sojourner. She imagined the pattern as a kind of decoder for the film. A viewer might look from screen to wall and find another relation among music, spiritual image and historical trace. The room supplies visual information that no single shot can contain. Smith's installations make interpretation spatial.
The Whitney's exhibition included Firespitters, a group of drawings, alongside the two films. The pairing reinforces the sense that Smith works in sequences and relations rather than isolated finished images. Drawing can hold a thought differently from a moving image. A space station can make both part of a visitor's route. The result is less a display of several media than an environment in which each medium changes how the next is encountered.
The future after the film ends
Smith's work does not offer the future as a place reached at the end of a journey. Her Smithsonian curator Saisha Grayson has argued that Sojourner asks what comes after the repeated staging of trauma in historical art. Smith's answer is not to erase injury. It is to direct attention toward people who made forms of collective life despite it. That change of emphasis lets the film search for methods of living rather than only evidence of suffering.
The distinction is visible in her own account of utopia. She told Glenn that intentional communities can succeed without permanence or totality. A garden may close; an ashram may lose its land; a generation may stop practicing what another began. The question is whether their actions made room for people to thrive and whether something from those actions can be carried forward. Smith's films take that carrying seriously. The camera preserves traces, while the moving women and portable radio make transmission an action.
There is a related question in Krull's Futuristic Dreams, which asks people with ties to the Democratic Republic of Congo to imagine other conditions for the country's future. The photo story gives that imagining visible form, but the interviewees speak about rights, education, labor and resources. Smith's films work through different histories and places. Their shared pressure is on the distance between an attractive future image and the collective conditions that could sustain a life inside it.
When the radio is set down, its message does not become a law. Someone has to choose what to do with what was heard. That is the power and the difficulty of Smith's work. She finds precedents for generosity, fellowship and self-organized life, then lets them speak through art that refuses to fix them as relics. Sojourner gives the viewer no finished blueprint. It offers a practice of listening, moving, assembling and returning to the question of whom a future is for.