A spaceship can be made without pretending to leave the world behind. In The AfroStar Galactica, John-Paul Zaccarini welcomes an audience aboard a research vessel whose destination is a future shaped by Black study, queer invention and collective attention. The journey belongs to more than one artist. Music, scent, aerial movement and spoken thought share the room. What makes the vessel convincing is not a claim that its passengers have escaped the conditions of ordinary life. It is the invitation to notice those conditions, change who sets the terms, and try another way of being together.
The 2025 CirkusMania programme calls the work an interactive performance lecture and explicitly places it in an Afrofuturist future. It names Zaccarini, musician and scent maker Toubab Holmes, aerial artist Lucie Maisha N’Duhirahe and Aurelia Day as its makers and performers. The range of their practices matters. A body in suspension offers one account of possibility; an aroma travels without asking permission from a stage boundary; a voice can move between scholarship, comedy and invitation. The speculative world is built through the different things those forms can do. The project’s own FutureBrownSpace website extends that work beyond the performance.
Zaccarini’s role is both visible and complicated. He is a professor at Stockholm University of the Arts, where FutureBrownSpace is based, but the professorial title is only one of the registers he brings onstage. CirkusMania introduces him as a “Dragademic and Professor of Shade,” a name that lets institutional authority coexist with camp and critique. The joke is also a design decision. It tells an audience how to enter a performance that will take ideas seriously without treating academic solemnity as the only legitimate vehicle for them.
The vessel gives that approach a physical shape. Its crew cannot be reduced to supporting figures around a single author. The performance depends on the exchange among their disciplines, and FutureBrownSpace depends on a wider network of artists and researchers. Zaccarini has spent years asking what a creative space might become when Black and brown people need not organize every sentence, gesture or image around a white gaze. The AfroStar Galactica turns that question outward. It gives an audience a structure in which to encounter the question rather than only hear its answer.
Before the vessel, a room
The route to this imagined craft began with the practical problem of where artists can think freely. In 2020 and 2021, Zaccarini led FutureBlackSpace at Stockholm University of the Arts. The university describes it as a space for recovery, discovery and artistic development among people of colour working in predominantly white institutions. Writing workshops addressed self-knowledge, resistance, care and the effect of the gaze under which work is usually judged. Its central questions concerned what could happen when participants rather than an institution’s expectations defined the conditions of their work.
This is a consequential distinction in an art school. Artists are frequently asked to produce evidence of originality while also adjusting themselves to the assumptions of those who evaluate them. FutureBlackSpace proposed a different starting point: a room in which participants could examine how those assumptions enter the making process. A workshop could become a method of artistic research, not an extracurricular remedy for discomfort. It could also generate practices that participants might carry into other rooms.
The university’s collaboration list for FutureBlackSpace includes psychologist Hanna Wallensteen, critical diversity consultant Anna Adeniji, photographer Andrea Kronlund-Davis, artist Toubab Holmes and fashion designer Camilla Wellton, among others. Their different professions suggest how widely the project understood the conditions of artistic work. Bodies, images, dress, mental strain and institutional rules are all part of that environment. A more sustaining creative space cannot be built through a single disciplinary vocabulary.
Zaccarini’s essay on the music video Brother gives an earlier, sharper account of this problem. He writes about making a queer of colour aesthetic space within a largely white university. In his reading, the video places brown bodies at the centre and shifts white heteronormativity to the edge of the frame. It is an argument about who composes an image and who has habitually been allowed to interpret it. The future brown space in that essay is not a distant planet. It begins with a change in the authority to frame, perform and look.
That change is as formal as it is political. A camera position is not a neutral place from which to see a dancer. A costume is not merely decoration put on after a movement has been planned. A soundtrack can invite a performer into a scene or make that body sound alien within it. Brother matters here because it shows Zaccarini thinking through a future in terms of the actual tools of performance. The proposition is tested in how an image is made. The spaceship that comes later enlarges the stage on which that test takes place.
A mixed-race life, addressed in performance
In a 2022 radio interview with WHQR, Zaccarini described a mixed-race South African mother, a white Italian father and a working-class upbringing in England. These are particulars of his own account, not an identity assigned by an observer. The interview also presents the range of his performance life: acting, dance, circus, mime, scholarship. That combination makes sense of the ease with which an audience can meet several versions of him in one work. The professor, comic host, performer and researcher do not have to be reconciled into one respectable persona.
His solo show Mix Race MixTape made the strain of such reconciliation a subject. In a 2023 interview ahead of a London performance, he discussed a work using stand-up, hip-hop and spoken word to explore intersectionality. Those forms allow a thought to arrive with a beat, a laugh or a pause. They can make the experience of categorization perceptible without converting it into a case study. A person may move among registers because the world already makes that person move among them.
Mix Race MixTape is useful groundwork for reading FutureBrownSpace, but it should not be swallowed by a retrospective label. Not every work by a Black artist becomes Afrofuturist because a later project explicitly uses that language. The earlier show examines a life shaped by racial classification and institutional expectation. The AfroStar Galactica asks how a group might build a more generous imaginative apparatus in response. The continuity lies in Zaccarini’s attention to who is allowed complexity. The forms, scale and claims of the works remain distinct.
The movement from a solo performance to a collaborative research vessel also changes the distribution of attention. A one-person show can expose what a single body has been asked to carry. A crew can share tasks and make the very practice of sharing visible. FutureBrownSpace keeps the difficulty that animated the earlier work in view while refusing to leave one performer alone with it.
House, crew and costume
Before The AfroStar Galactica, there was House of Future Brown. CirkusMania presented it in 2023 as a work in progress and described it explicitly as an Afrofuturist fable of brown queer magic. The programme named scent, song, circus and scenography as parts of its world and credited Zaccarini, Holmes and N’Duhirahe onstage. It also named Anna Adeniji for consultancy, Erwin Semler for video and Andrea Davis for photography. These credits sketch a production in which thinking, sensation and visual construction develop together.
The word “house” has several uses here. It can be shelter, a place of performance, a gathering that establishes its own rules. A work in progress called House of Future Brown could hold an audience within a provisional world. The later craft could then carry that world into an imagined journey. This is a reading of the two presentations, not a claim that every element of the first survived into the second. What can be documented is their common ensemble and their shared, explicit Afrofuturist frame.
Wellton’s contribution belongs in the account of that world. The university lists her as a fashion designer in the FutureBlackSpace collaboration, and Zaccarini’s published account of the later project names her among the FutureBrownSpace ground crew. Wellton, who is also part of Krull’s Fashion Designers Encyclopedia, describes herself as the project’s resident stylist. She says she created outfits for Zaccarini, Holmes and N’Duhirahe. The institutional and project records name her collaboration; her own account makes the costume work visible. Those clothes are part of the performance’s authorship, not anonymous surfaces around the performers.
Dress can help a speculative production declare its own social order. It identifies the people who occupy a space, changes the line of a moving body and gives a viewer information before anyone speaks. For a performer who works in the air, clothing must also live with suspension and motion. For a musician, it remains visible while attention moves between sound and stage. The production record establishes Wellton’s role, while the particular cuts and materials of her garments deserve attention on their own terms.
Naming the stylist also corrects an easy error in writing about Afrofuturism. The field is often introduced through large concepts and spectacular images, while the people who make those images wearable disappear into an undifferentiated “look.” A future is constructed through labour: patterns, fittings, rehearsals, fabric that must meet the demands of a specific performer. The records for FutureBrownSpace name a ground crew as well as a cabin crew. That division is playful, but it recognizes a real structure of making. The vessel needs the people who build the conditions for its departure.
The mothership and its many routes
Zaccarini’s performance lecture The Mothership is Not a Metaphor is an unusually valuable record because it sets out the project’s ideas in his own performance language. The mothership is an organizing device for a journey through Black study, embodied memory and speculative possibility. It invites participants to do more than watch a symbol pass before them. The imagined craft creates a sequence, a set of positions and an opportunity to consider what each person brings aboard.
An audience may understand “space” as the distance between planets. FutureBrownSpace insists on another scale as well: the space required for a person to think without constant translation. It is a space made among people, held for a time and vulnerable to the institutions around it. The science-fiction setting does not cancel the university, the theatre or the history of racialization in Sweden. It offers a way to approach them from an altered position.
The university’s description of FutureBrownSpace calls it an Afro-diasporic artistic research initiative based in Black Studies. It identifies public seminars, workshops, performances, collaborations and publishing as its forms. It also says the project addresses the pressures of minority stress and unconscious racism within Swedish public and institutional space. This double purpose matters. The work gives practitioners room to develop art and asks institutions to face the conditions in which that art is made. Neither aim can substitute for the other.
FutureBrownSpace has had the support of the Swedish Research Council and a base at Stockholm University of the Arts. Institutional backing can make time, rooms and production resources available. The project’s question remains how to use those resources without surrendering its self-defined perspective. Zaccarini’s earlier work on the gaze makes the tension legible. A programme may be hosted by an institution and still demand a different centre of authority inside it. The performance lecture makes that negotiation public rather than hiding it in a grant application.
The project’s practices extend beyond the performances. The university records seminars under the title A Season of Black Study and a network of collaborations across cultural institutions. Study, in this context, is not merely the collection of evidence to be cited later. It is a shared practice involving conversation, movement, memory and the development of work. A circus programme and a research seminar can therefore belong to the same project without being the same kind of event.
What the audience is asked to carry
The 2025 festival account identifies aerial suspension, movement, live music and scent as elements of The AfroStar Galactica. Each alters the lecture format. Aerial work reorganizes the relation between floor and height. Scent cannot be confined to the line of sight. Music establishes a shared time in which a thought may feel different from how it reads on a page. The point is not to overwhelm an argument with effects. These media let the argument pass through more than one channel of attention.
Zaccarini’s performance persona can guide that traffic. As host, he can address an audience directly, announce a departure and make a research question sound like an invitation. Yet the crew gives the voyage its other forces. Holmes’s music and scent making, N’Duhirahe’s aerial practice and Day’s credited participation remain part of the work’s identity. The festival credits “by and with” all four. Even when Zaccarini is the figure most readily identified with the project, that line resists turning collaboration into one person’s supporting scenery.
Wellton’s costumes occupy a similar position in the making. The performers do not arrive on a speculative vessel as unmediated bodies. Someone has made decisions about how they appear and how garments move with them. Whatever their individual shapes and materials, the outfits contribute to the distinction between an ordinary lecture room and the crew’s imagined craft. Their authorship belongs alongside the music, aerial work and spoken performance.
In images from an earlier FutureBrownSpace shoot supplied by Wellton, a group gathers around a red car at night wearing layered white outfits. High collars, soft volume and long hanging panels make a shared visual language without making the people identical. In one photograph, a person stands above the car while others sit or lean around it. Another places the group against an edited field of stars. The ordinary vehicle becomes a possible means of travel between worlds. Wellton photographed and edited these images as well as styling and making the outfits. The photographs show what her contribution does visually: the group can be read as a crew before any caption explains the premise.
This restraint is part of taking the work seriously. The phrase “Afrofuturist” can invite a critic to supply familiar images of chrome, stars or bright fabric whether or not a production uses them. The AfroStar Galactica has a vessel, but its material vocabulary must be read from what its makers actually placed in the room. The documented forms are enough to begin: the performer’s welcome, the aerial body, music, scent, movement, dress, and a public asked to imagine a future together.
A Nordic location, a wider conversation
The work is based in Stockholm, but it is not a closed national expression. Zaccarini’s own family and professional history cross South Africa, Italy, England and Sweden. FutureBrownSpace describes its participants and reference points in Afro-diasporic terms. The festival account explicitly uses Afrofuturist language, while the university’s research description attends to the particular institutional pressures of Sweden. Both scales are necessary. One explains the artistic conversation; the other explains why this work takes the form it does here.
Krull’s history of Nordic Afrofuturism in the 2020s places The AfroStar Galactica among contemporary works that make a Black speculative future tangible through performance. The connection is strongest when it remains precise. Zaccarini and his collaborators are not representatives appointed to stand for every Black artist in the Nordics. They have made particular works whose programmes and research accounts explicitly claim an Afrofuturist horizon. The distinction leaves room for neighbouring practices to be considered on their own terms.
Nor does “future” require a promise that difficulty will vanish. FutureBlackSpace began with the strain of working under a gaze that fixes identity from outside. FutureBrownSpace has continued to ask how makers can develop their work in spite of that strain, and how an institution might be made to hear them. House of Future Brown staged a provisional shelter; The AfroStar Galactica gave the shelter a crew and a course. The sequence does not prove an inevitable progress. It shows artists testing different structures for a question that remains open.
The most durable image may be the act of boarding. An audience accepts the terms of a temporary world, but it also carries its own knowledge into that world. A craft built from performance cannot transport anyone away from history. It can make a short, deliberate interval in which the people aboard decide what they will study, sense and imagine together. Zaccarini’s achievement is to give that interval a memorable form. The crew’s achievement is to make it possible at all.