In Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice, Rebekah Ubuntu stands before moving images of sea and space and sings. The stage image has the theatrical shine of science fiction, but its point of departure is not escape from Earth. Ubuntu uses the scale of oceans and galaxies to ask who has been permitted to imagine belonging to them. The performer’s silver costume refers to Black women astronauts, especially Mae Jemison, whose image opened a possibility that Ubuntu had rarely seen represented. The future in this work begins with a correction to the visible past.
Ubuntu’s practice moves through performance, film, sound and mixed reality. A Serpentine interview with the artist offers an unusually detailed account of how Despair, Hope and Healing took shape with creative partner Jaime Peschiera. The work began in 2017 and developed through acts of listening and response. In the stage version, Ubuntu’s body and voice meet a fast-moving projection of archival footage. In a later augmented reality version, the three movements become environments that enter the viewer’s room. The medium changes, but the work retains its argument: environmental catastrophe is lived unevenly, and imagining a future requires attention to the people whose knowledge has been pushed aside.
Ubuntu places the work within Afrofuturism in their own words. They describe Black speculative traditions as a constellation rather than one narrow style, and connect their sound practice to Kodwo Eshun’s writing on sonic fiction. Their account matters because it is specific. The silver costume is not a shorthand for “space”; it is an homage to women whose flight disrupted assumptions about who could leave the atmosphere. The archive behind the performer is not neutral historical wallpaper; it is material that Ubuntu and Peschiera have rearranged to question the authority of its original makers.
From the shore to the stars
Ubuntu has explained the emotional geography of the work through a personal memory. After their mother died, they went to the shore to grieve. The meeting of water and night sky became a place to feel connection with maternal ancestors and the wider universe. That account does not make the sea a simple symbol of loss or the stars a simple symbol of hope. Both are immense, and both exceed any one person’s control. The work’s journeys through deep water and outer space draw from that experience of finding belonging without pretending that grief has vanished.
This is why the performance’s cosmic imagery has a bodily anchor. Ubuntu sings into a microphone in front of projected film. The voice comes from a person present in the room, even as the images travel far beyond it. The audience does not watch a disembodied astronaut in a distant vessel. It watches an artist conduct a conversation between a living body and a set of images inherited from other systems of looking. The scale expands, then contracts to a breath, a note, a face.
The homage to Mae Jemison has a precise place in the work’s development. Ubuntu said they first learned of Jemison while researching the second movement, Hope (Are You There?), with Peschiera in 2017. That discovery changed the imagined line connecting the artist, their mother, their grandmother and future Black women. The astronaut becomes more than an individual role model. Her visible achievement alters the apparent boundaries of a family’s possible future. Ubuntu’s costume gives the performer a place in that line without claiming to repeat Jemison’s journey.
Space is sometimes used in art as an image of unlimited freedom. Ubuntu’s work keeps its relation to Earth. Jemison’s flight matters, yet the performance asks what the view from space reveals about the planet below. Ubuntu has drawn on the experience astronauts describe when they see Earth as small and vulnerable. The image of a whole planet can produce a sense of shared fate; the work insists that shared fate does not mean shared exposure to harm. Some communities endure polluted air and water long before others acknowledge a crisis. The cosmic viewpoint becomes meaningful only when it returns us to those unequal conditions.
An archive with a soundtrack removed
One of the performance’s most exact artistic decisions concerns found footage. Ubuntu and Peschiera used material from nature documentaries and other archives, changing its order, pace and sonic surroundings. The artist points out that such films often claim scientific objectivity while carrying a colonial account of who observes and who is observed. Removing the original soundtrack is part of the intervention. A familiar voice of authority no longer tells the viewer how to understand an animal, a landscape or a distant community.
The projected film does not present a seamless archive. Its source images have different resolutions, frame rates and shapes. Ubuntu has described repurposing those differences rather than concealing them. A sequence can therefore expose the fact that these pictures were made at different times, for different audiences and under different rules. Their new arrangement asks the viewer to look again instead of sinking into a supposedly transparent documentary view. The film’s montage is an argument made by editing.
In the second movement, accelerated 16 mm images of sites in Rapa Nui, Egypt and Peru are joined to a voiced invitation to search beneath the visible surface. Ubuntu says the sequence culminates in an image of Jemison in her astronaut suit moving through imagined computer-generated planets and galaxies. The artist consciously set this Black woman’s journey against the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The point is not simply to place a different face in a famous film’s visual language. It is to alter whose imagination seems to command the voyage.
That decision gives Despair, Hope and Healing two archives to work on at once. One is the archive of exploration and natural history, with its conventions of authority. The other is the archive of science fiction cinema, where the supposedly universal human often had a narrow appearance. Ubuntu moves among both while remaining visibly present as a performer. The images do not swallow the person; the person remakes their sequence. The result is a future assembled from material that already exists, yet previously told a different story.
Three rooms inside one room
The augmented reality version, developed with Shape Arts and Hot Knife Digital Media, gives the three movements a new scale. Instead of standing before a projection in a venue, a viewer can bring virtual environments into a familiar private space. In the Serpentine conversation, interviewer Leah Clements describes a volcano and storm entering her bedroom, then a grassland with butterflies, then water with marine life. The sequence moves from threat toward relief, but it does not erase the first room. A domestic place becomes temporarily porous to climates and voices that cannot be kept outside by closing a door.
Ubuntu and Peschiera chose a stylized, low-poly visual language rather than an illusion of perfect realism. The decision makes the environments metaphorical and gives viewers room to respond without being overwhelmed by a simulation of disaster. It also emphasizes that the work is an authored world. The volcano need not be mistaken for a real eruption to change the way someone feels about the room beneath it. A deliberately constructed image can be powerful without pretending to be the event itself.
The first movement draws on the words of Cheryl Johnson, whose work with People for Community Recovery concerns communities affected by environmental pollution. The last draws on a speech by Autumn Peltier, an Anishinaabe water protector. Between them is Ubuntu’s voice and an invitation to reconnect with ancestors as a source of hope. These voices do different work and come from different struggles. The structure does not make them interchangeable. It lets the movement from air to land to water carry a set of claims about who gets to live safely within those elements.
Putting the work in a viewer’s room raises questions about consent. Ubuntu has said that they and Peschiera considered the power of an artwork that enters someone’s personal space, especially when its subject can be traumatic. The viewer can turn the application off. That ability is not an incidental technical feature. It helps define the relation between the artist and the person receiving the work. The piece presses an urgent subject while giving the viewer control over how long to remain with it.
The artists also created alternative routes into the exhibition, including audio description, an audiobook, captioned and signed versions. This matters to the form. A work about whose futures are imaginable has to consider who can encounter it now. Access changes the paths through which the voice, image and argument reach an audience. Ubuntu’s move from live stage to augmented reality did not end with a new platform; it required thinking about the people that platform might exclude.
A performance with other lives
Ubuntu stepped away from live performance after the final 2019 staging of Despair, Hope and Healing. In the Serpentine interview, they describe the physical preparation performance required, including cardiovascular and vocal training, and the strain of commissions that did not always provide adequate support. The later mixed-reality work should not be read as a simple story of technology replacing a body. It is a change in how a body can remain in the work without carrying every demand of the stage at every showing.
Sound becomes especially important in that shift. Ubuntu speaks of centering a sonic body in moving-image and mixed-reality work. A recorded voice can travel where its maker cannot be physically present. It can also preserve the precision of a performer’s choices: a pause, a rise in pitch, the texture of a sung line. Those qualities are not a lesser substitute for presence. They produce another kind of encounter, one that viewers may meet at their own pace and in spaces the artist never enters.
The question of pace links Ubuntu’s art to their working conditions. They have spoken publicly about disability, boundaries and the need for time to reflect. In an industry that often rewards constant exposure, the ability to choose when and how to be visible can be an artistic resource. Despair, Hope and Healing contains dazzling imagery, but its production history also asks how artists can make ambitious work without being consumed by the demands placed on them. The future it seeks must include the people who make it.
That conviction appears in the artist’s account of collaboration. Ubuntu describes an ecosystem of care among the people who contribute to a project, including material support. Peschiera’s role is essential to the iterative development of the performance and its images. Shape Arts and Hot Knife Digital Media are part of the augmented reality version’s making. Naming those relationships lets the work’s future take a collective shape. Its worlds are not the solitary invention of a genius sealed away from everyone else.
Rest as a speculative act
In 2019 Ubuntu devised Afrofuturism and Chill, a workshop that used Afrofuturist art and intersectional transfeminist thought to explore replenishment. Its title is playful, but its question is serious: what would it mean for Black and marginalized people to regard rest and care as part of imagining a future, rather than as rewards earned after endless labor? The workshop was designed as a collective space for self-discovery and connection. It extends Ubuntu’s speculative practice beyond the screen or stage and into the relations among participants.
That project prevents a narrow reading of their work as a series of spectacular images about climate crisis. Ubuntu is also interested in the conditions under which people can gather, recover and make decisions. The sea and galaxies of Despair, Hope and Healing are expansive settings, yet the action repeatedly returns to a small scale: a person breathing, listening, turning toward another person, choosing to stay or leave an environment. Afrofuturism here is not only an imagined destination. It is a method for altering the present conditions of imagination.
The same thought connects Ubuntu’s work to Krull’s conversation with Julie Dash about speculative storytelling. Dash’s film and Ubuntu’s performance use different media and answer different historical pressures, but each makes room for a Black artist to interpret time rather than simply endure its passing. Ancestors remain active in a future-facing work. A living voice can revise the authority of an inherited image. The connection lies in that right to arrange time from within one’s own experience.
Ubuntu’s art resists the easy promise that a better future will arrive through invention alone. The projected voyage depends on archival editing. The augmented reality worlds depend on choices about access and consent. The hopeful turn from storm to grass and water depends on voices demanding clean air and safe water. Even the astronaut image depends on noticing a person whose achievement was absent from the artist’s earlier sense of possibility. Every future in this work has a material route into being.
At the close of the journey, the ocean is not a place where the planet’s troubles disappear. It is another living environment that people must protect, and one that holds memory as well as danger. Ubuntu began from grief at the shore and made a work that returns the viewer to Earth with a widened sense of who belongs here. The silver-clad figure in front of the screen does not ask us to abandon the world. They ask us to hear it differently, and to make enough room in its future for the people who have already been speaking.