In Garden of Eden, the first act of imagination is deceptively simple: change who is allowed into the garden. Ima Iduozee’s 2017 choreography took a foundational European image of innocence, the biblical paradise of Adam and Eve, and asked what happens when two nonwhite bodies occupy it. The answer could not be supplied by changing the cast alone. Every expectation attached to the image, including beauty, purity, gender and the right to be seen as universal, had to be reconsidered. A garden that had seemed timeless revealed the people it had habitually left outside.
The work placed Iduozee and dancer Esete Sutinen in a shifting space rather than a fixed illustration of scripture. In a 2017 conversation with Aurora Lemma for Ruskeat Tytöt, Iduozee described the familiar image of fair-skinned Adam and Eve and the ideas of normative beauty and innocence it had helped sustain. His choreography did not set out to produce a corrected picture for the same frame. It made the garden fluid, multiple and open to bodies that need not explain why they belong there. Afrofuturism helped him imagine that freedom of definition.
There is a particular force to making this argument through dance. A printed image can be studied from a distance; a performing body occupies the same time as its audience. It can turn, pause, depart and return. It can make an old scene feel unstable because the viewer cannot hold it still. Iduozee had been working as a dancer and choreographer long before the project. Here he used that knowledge to place the politics of an inherited image inside movement itself.
The early choreography also illuminates his later filmmaking. In the short After We’re Gone, a woman enters an underground shrine and encounters a royal priestess. Ritual opens a passage through the African diaspora, and time becomes less obedient to the division between what has happened and what has yet to arrive. A director could make that premise into a catalogue of futuristic visual effects. Iduozee instead lets a person’s encounter with another person open the imaginative journey. Across the two works, bodies are not merely placed within speculative worlds. They help make those worlds possible.
A garden without the old gate
Garden of Eden emerged in Helsinki’s performance scene and premiered within the 2017 URB festival programme. Its two performers were Iduozee and Sutinen. The contemporary interview describes an ambiguous garden rather than a set of fixed roles. That ambiguity is a formal decision. If a viewer cannot confidently identify which performer is Adam and which is Eve, or whether those roles still organise the piece, the familiar story loses some of its power to police the bodies in front of them.
The biblical source is hardly one story with one meaning. In European art, however, its human figures have often been presented through a narrow visual convention. Iduozee looked at how such images can settle into common sense: who appears naturally pure, who must justify their presence, and which combinations of body and place seem ordinary. His response was not to offer a lecture on iconography from the stage. It was to make an encounter in which the audience could feel the inadequacy of the usual roles.
In the Ruskeat Tytöt interview, Iduozee spoke about the cost of being asked repeatedly to explain oneself when one does not fit an expected category. That labour drains energy from making art. The garden gives him a place to suspend the demand. The dancers can enter as themselves and as figures in a changing fiction, without submitting to a final classification. Paradise becomes a test of who has been told that beauty and belonging are conditional.
The article places Afrofuturism at the centre of this experiment. Iduozee described it as radical dreaming and a redefinition of Black experience. Its usefulness for Garden of Eden lies in permission to begin from another assumption: a Black body can be ordinary, even universal, within a work’s imagined world. This is more than a casting preference. It changes how a gesture may be read. A performer’s movement no longer has to serve as evidence of difference for an audience presumed to stand outside it.
A dance cannot control every reading, and Iduozee did not ask it to. He told Lemma that contemporary choreography allows people to arrive with different backgrounds and associations. An audience member may not decode every image or movement into a stable message. That openness is part of the medium’s strength. It grants spectators a role in making meaning while insisting that their initial assumptions are not the work’s final authority.
This freedom extends to Sutinen’s presence. The two performers do not function as an isolated emblem of Iduozee’s biography. Their partnership creates relations on stage: proximity, difference, shared space and changing orientation. A paradise made by more than one body has to account for what each can do and how each is seen. Its future is not a solo possession.
A mixtape made of histories
After We’re Gone takes the temporal question further. The film belongs to Iduozee’s Diaspora Mixtapes series and was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Its film record describes Zena entering an underground shrine to meet a royal priestess. Their ritual reimagines the journey of the African diaspora. The short combines fiction with archive, bringing historical people and events into a speculative frame rather than treating either mode as sufficient on its own.
The format of a mixtape suggests selection, sequence and transition. A track can bring a listener into a new time or place without erasing the one just heard. Iduozee’s film uses that logic for images and historical material. Its listed archival references include Lola Odusoga, Rosa Emilia Clay, Donata Pennanen, FESTAC 77, the Windrush generation, Sun Ra, Barbara Ann Teer, Miriam Makeba and Muraina Oyelami. They are not interchangeable icons of Black achievement. They point to different geographies, professions and moments: pageantry, migration, theatre, music, cultural festival and political life. Placed within a short film, their juxtaposition asks the viewer to imagine a diaspora made of crossings rather than a single line of descent.
The cast has similarly distinct roles. Miranda Chambers plays Zena; Elizabeth Haaparanta plays the priestess; Ajak Majok plays Isayah; Emmanuel Culkin Mugisha plays Cloud. These are named characters in a constructed world, not anonymous figures attached to a broad theme. Iduozee also appears as a shaman in the production listing. The fiction gives the archive a place to be encountered, while the archive prevents the fiction from floating free of historical lives.
In a 2023 interview about the film, Iduozee said he wanted to celebrate ancestry and heritage while exploring migration, fantasy and the intersections of African cultures with the Western society around him. He was also precise about Finland. The film speaks, he said, to Black presence and history there. That claim shifts the usual frame in which a Finnish audience sees the African diaspora as a story occurring elsewhere. The shrine and its journey have a local address even as they move across continents and centuries.
After We’re Gone reached Kiasma’s ARS22 programme in October 2022 and the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2023. The nearly ten-minute short brought together a specific crew for both gallery and festival audiences. Nita Rehtonen produced it, Max Smeds photographed it, and other performers and makers contributed to its form. The ambition of a diasporic film does not diminish those practical collaborations; it depends on them.
A Finnish public broadcaster interview has Iduozee describe Afrofuturism as an artistic freedom: the ability to draw African cultural inheritance into the present and project it toward a future without shrinking a dream to fit an existing category. The film’s ritual can be understood in those terms. A priestess is not an ornament announcing “Africa” to a viewer. She is an agent within a narrative that permits history to be felt as active, and permits a present-day character to approach it through more than a museum display or a lesson.
The underground setting also changes the usual direction of futuristic travel. Science fiction often sends its protagonists upward, toward a spaceship or distant horizon. Zena goes inward and below. The journey of possibility begins in a place where what was buried can become newly available. It suggests why a future need not be a clean break from the past. Sometimes one must descend into layered history before another way forward can be imagined.
From choreography to the moving image
Iduozee’s career cannot be reduced to one speculative short. His debut choreography This Is the Title premiered in 2012 and toured internationally. He has worked in theatre, music video, film and commercial direction, and choreographed the Finnish series Dance Brothers. These different settings require different kinds of timing. A concert film, a stage work and a television series each asks a maker to decide where the viewer’s attention should go and how a body carries meaning across a sequence.
That range helps explain the control of forms in After We’re Gone. A ritual is not only a narrative device; it has duration, gesture and relation among participants. Iduozee’s dance background makes him attentive to those qualities. The bodies in a shrine cannot be treated simply as vehicles for dialogue. Their positions and movements shape the conditions under which Zena can meet the stories assembled around her. The film’s imagery and its archive may travel widely, but its starting point is a performed encounter.
The film record describes the work as using conventions of documentary and fiction together. Each convention makes different promises. Documentary material points toward things that occurred. Fiction can propose links, encounters and possibilities that a record alone cannot show. Iduozee’s mixture refuses the false choice between a truthful past and an imaginative future. It asks how the two can speak while keeping their different claims intact. A face from an archive is not a cast character; a cast character can nevertheless guide a viewer into a meaningful relation with archival history.
His earlier work Garden of Eden used another inherited archive, the many representations of a biblical paradise. It did not display historical footage, but it worked against a long visual tradition that viewers may have absorbed without naming it. The film’s archive is more explicit. The underlying method persists: encounter a received set of images, ask whom those images have omitted, and make a form in which people can appear otherwise.
This is why the artist’s phrase radical dreaming should be taken seriously. Dreaming here is not a refusal of history. The works begin with religious imagery, migration, Black life in Finland and named historical people. They make new relations among that material. An audience may leave with no complete map of the diaspora, and a performance may resist a single interpretation. Neither work depends on total explanation to exert its force. Each asks the viewer to notice where a familiar image stops being enough.
Iduozee also directed New Moon and Villa for Helsinki International Film Festival. The festival describes New Moon as a trailer that moves from images of toppled colonial statues toward another future; Villa imagines lovers crossing from isolation into a space where nature remains abundant. Both works extend his movement between choreography and cinema. Their different methods also sharpen the particular force of Garden of Eden and After We’re Gone, where Iduozee connects Black presence in Finland to his own account of Afrofuturism.
The future begins with who may be present
The question in Garden of Eden is not only what paradise looks like. It is who can stand inside it without being treated as an exception. After We’re Gone asks a related question of history: whose journey is visible when a society imagines its past, and how might that visibility change its future? The answers take different forms. One is live choreography with two bodies negotiating a mutable garden. The other is a film that moves between ritual and archive. The distinction matters because Afrofuturism does not prescribe one medium or a single visual code.
Krull’s conversation with Julie Dash about Daughters of the Dust and speculative fiction offers a useful cinematic counterpart. Dash describes a form that could carry memory without following a conventional Western line of narration. Iduozee’s work has its own scale and geography, but it also lets time fold. Archive, ritual and future projection coexist. The film does not require a viewer to leave one behind before entering the next.
The Finnish setting is vital to the argument. Iduozee has said the film concerns Black presence and history there. A nation’s cultural memory can be narrowed when its Black artists are asked to speak only as recent arrivals or permanent outsiders. His speculative work refuses that limit. It reaches across a diaspora while placing the maker and his collaborators within the Nordic present. The future they envision is not imported into Finland as a novelty. It is made by people already living and working there.
His handling of the garden and shrine also resists a hierarchy in which the future belongs to technology and the past belongs to culture. A stage body can remake an old story. A ritual can structure a film that also uses archival imagery and contemporary cinema. A mixtape can become a way to think across historical fragments. The new is not pure invention separated from everything that came before. It is an arrangement that allows neglected connections to become perceptible.
There is pleasure in that arrangement. Iduozee speaks of artistic freedom and the right to dream without reduction. The works hold critical questions about racial categories and national memory, but they also make room for beauty, fantasy and movement. Such pleasures are not a reward offered after the political work is done. They are part of its means. A body entering an open garden, or a character beginning a journey through a shrine, can feel the expansion of possible life before that expansion is translated into argument.
At the centre remains a decision about the viewer’s gaze. An audience can look for a familiar paradise and discover its limits. It can follow Zena underground and meet a history that does not travel in a straight line. In both cases, Iduozee gives Black life more than a place in an existing picture. He changes the picture’s terms. The garden can hold different bodies. A Finnish film can carry a diasporic memory across continents. A future begins when presence no longer needs permission from a story that was made too small.