An ocean can be scenery. It can also hold a history a nation prefers to leave offshore. By 2009, Jeannette Ehlers was making photographic works titled Atlantic (Endless Row) and Atlantic (Gate Of No Return). Her account of her practice places Denmark’s colonial involvement in the Caribbean and the transatlantic slave trade at its centre. The titles make an expanse of water carry human passage and historical violence. Elsewhere in the decade, young Afro-Swedes wrote their experiences into a book called Afrosvensk i det nya Sverige. These were different acts of image making and self-description. Together they show how a future depends on who gets to describe the present.
In 2002, Social Text devoted an issue to Afrofuturism, bringing literature, music, visual art and digital culture into one argument. Alondra Nelson, Nalo Hopkinson, Alexander G. Weheliye, Fatimah Tuggar and Anna Everett were among its contributors. The issue was made beyond the Nordics, yet its question could travel: whose experience is built into a story of technological progress, and whose is left outside its frame? In Copenhagen and Sweden, artists and writers were asking their own questions about representation and belonging. The similarity lay in the pressure placed on the present, not in a shared programme.
In 2003, Kodwo Eshun published “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”. He argued for counter-futures and asked who had the power to project a future at all. Such a question can travel farther than any one visual style. It asks a viewer in Copenhagen, as in London, to consider who has been assigned the role of modern subject and who is still treated as evidence from somebody else's past. The local works of the decade answer through photographs, campaigns and collective writing rather than through a common image of space travel.
The forms used in the Nordics during these years had their own force. A photograph could trouble a national memory of the Atlantic. A campaign could address an image of Blackness circulating in Danish public life. A workshop could give Afro-Swedish young people room to put experience into words. These practices met the decade’s international arguments from different positions. Their makers were attending to bodies, representation and colonial memory before any critic decided which works belonged under a single name.
Copenhagen: the body and the image
A woman in yellow arrives where election cameras are waiting. The colour catches the eye before the viewer can decide what kind of person she is supposed to be. In 2001, Ellen Nyman took her SPACECAMPAIGN into Danish political events as Alem, a character whose yellow cloth evoked a chador. Artist and historian Nina Cramer describes the work as an intervention into racist depictions of East African Muslim women. The costume did not simply illustrate a stereotype. Alem moved through the places where public stories about immigration were being made, and the person wearing it could act, interrupt and answer back.
The Gothenburg International Biennial’s account gives one encounter a date and a setting. On Danish election night, 20 November 2001, Nyman stood outside parliament in the glare of the broadcast media and sang the Danish national anthem as the leader of the Danish People’s Party entered. A national song sounded from a body that the party’s rhetoric tended to place outside the nation. The action put two ideas of Danish belonging in the same frame and let the dissonance do its work. Nyman did not have to invent a distant planet to expose the strange rules of the world at hand.
Other parts of SPACECAMPAIGN extended the question beyond one election-night image. Cramer points to a 2003 poster that confronted sensational accounts of European borders, and an exhibition document from the time describes Nyman’s 2004 proposal asking who could become Denmark’s prime minister. It imagined an African-born woman presenting herself as a serious candidate. Such a campaign changes the grammar of an ordinary political picture. The viewer is invited to register how quickly credibility is assigned, or withheld, before a candidate has spoken. Nyman’s work made that interval between seeing and judging into its stage.
Jeannette Ehlers gives the decade a set of objects with the Atlantic in their names. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006, and her portfolio dates the photographs Atlantic (Endless Row) and Atlantic (Gate Of No Return) to 2009. An Atlantic video installation also belongs to that year, as does an exhibition in Aarhus listed in her biography. The photographs, installation and exhibition made different demands on viewers. Their common word joined a body of water to the history that had crossed it.
In Atlantic (Endless Row), the bodies are missing but their reflections remain. Ehlers explained in an interview that she photographed a group at the water by Fort Prinzenstein in Ghana, then digitally removed the people from the image. Their reflections still appear in the water. The eye first tries to resolve a puzzle: how can a reflection have no visible source? Then the place makes that visual absence painful. The fort was connected to the forced departure of enslaved Africans. Ehlers gives the viewer a trace and withholds the body that would make the trace easy to explain away. Looking becomes an act of noticing the removal.
The word endless does not mean that the same event simply repeats. It suggests a line of lives whose full number cannot be held in one image, and a historical consequence that did not end at the water’s edge. Ehlers’ description of Denmark’s Caribbean colonial entanglement places that Ghanaian shore within a longer route. The work refuses the comforting distance between a Danish viewer and an Atlantic history supposedly located elsewhere. An empty patch in a photograph can be as politically charged as a visible figure when the artist makes us ask who was removed, by whom, and why we were prepared to overlook the absence.
The same visual method moved indoors in Ehlers’ 2009 video Black Magic at the White House. In the artist’s account to Art Matter, she dances at Marienborg, the Danish prime minister’s official residence. Digital editing removes her body but leaves a moving silhouette within its rooms. The location carries its own connections to colonial trade. Ehlers did not choose a ruin where the past could be safely admired. She set her image inside a place still used by contemporary political power. The dance moves through the rooms, and the body’s absence keeps drawing attention to the history that official interiors can make invisible.
In Ehlers’ work, colonial history remains active in the present’s visual habits. That concern can be heard beside Eshun’s question about who is allowed to project a future. They approach the problem from different directions. Eshun writes about counter-futures; Ehlers’ Atlantic works return a Danish viewer to a route through which people were forced out of their own futures. The comparison becomes useful where it sends attention back to the works, their materials and the people made visible or absent within them.
Ehlers describes herself as a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent. That geography is present in the work’s attention to Denmark and the Caribbean, yet the photographs are more than a diagram of an artist’s heritage. They ask a viewer to connect a national history to a route across water and to consider how its violence survives in the images a society makes of itself. Ehlers worked in photography, video, performance and, later, sculpture. In the 2000s, Atlantic gave her inquiry a named body of work through which to confront the region’s connections beyond its own shores.
Sweden: writing a collective present
In Sweden, the Afro-Swedish organization founded in 1990 remained a site for collective speech. Creative writing workshops with young Afro-Swedes produced the 2009 book Afrosvensk i det nya Sverige, edited by Cecilia Gärding. Ryan Thomas Skinner’s study describes participants writing about experience, racism, belonging and aspiration in Sweden. The title names a “new Sweden” in which these writers already lived. Its pages let people contest who was allowed to describe that country in the first person.
The book emerged from a shared workshop without erasing the authorship of its individual writers. A meeting, a page and an editor gave young people a way to hear one another and frame their experiences as valid, as Skinner reports. The work of listening was part of the work of writing. A person can begin with a private account of a classroom, street or family encounter; in a workshop, another participant can recognize a pattern or offer a different reading. The group made room for those distinctions to become public rather than allowing one story to stand for everyone.
The writers were asked, in effect, to describe a place that frequently described them first. That reversal has its own imaginative force. It can expose the gap between an official story of national belonging and the experiences of people living within it. The book’s title points to the present country and the one its authors hoped to inhabit more fully. These writings are not presented as Afrofuturist fiction. Their contribution to this six-part history is the authority of self-description on which many future visions depend.
The Danish and Swedish scenes did not mirror each other. Ehlers’ Atlantic addressed the historical route between Denmark and the Caribbean; Nyman confronted public stereotypes; young Afro-Swedes assembled a book from experiences of life in Sweden. None gives an interchangeable answer to Eshun’s question about who can make a future. Their particularity is the point. The region’s Black cultural life was being made through works, meetings and acts of address that emerged from different histories, even when similar pressures could be felt across borders.
A predecessor still at work
Moki Cherry’s career continued into the decade. Moderna Museet’s retrospective follows work through 2007 and records a 2008 exhibition in Landskrona. She died in 2009. Her 1970s collaboration with Don Cherry remains important, but a visitor in the 2000s could also encounter the later work of an independent artist who had spent decades crossing textile, design, stage and everyday space. She continued making while younger artists developed their own languages for identity, memory and futurity. The decades overlapped within actual working lives.
The museum describes a practice in which design, drama, music and visual art had porous borders. For Moki, a room could be a place to live and a place to perform; an artwork could move from a wall into the social life around it. That method remained alive in the 2000s, though she did not use Afrofuturism as its name. To see her late work only as evidence for a later category would miss the long experiment she conducted on her own terms.
Her continued presence changes the decade’s sense of time. The 1970s were not sealed in a museum while the 2000s began from nothing. A person could encounter Moki’s work through a new exhibition, hear an older recording in a different room, then return to contemporary artists with different questions. Influence is not guaranteed by such proximity. Coexistence is enough to make a cultural present richer: living makers, older forms and new critical words share space without becoming one school.
The future begins with a description of the present
The 2000s made a question audible in several keys. In Eshun’s 2003 essay, counter-futures oppose the assumption that powerful institutions alone may forecast what is coming. Ehlers’ Atlantic brought a colonial route into Denmark’s contemporary visual field. Nyman’s campaign addressed the image of Blackness already circulating in public. Afro-Swedish workshop writers described their lives from within Sweden. Their methods and self-descriptions differed. Each encountered a present that somebody else had already drawn and asked who might revise its lines.
The acts differ in scale. A journal essay travels through scholars and artists; a photograph can make a viewer pause before an inherited landscape; a workshop turns a private experience into a sentence another person can hear. The modes of address matter as much as the subjects. Eshun argued in critical prose. Ehlers gave the Atlantic a place in photographs and installation. Young writers put multiple Afro-Swedish lives on the page without asking one person to stand for all of them. The region’s later speculative performance could draw energy from such varied forms of address, though no direct line of influence is required to see their significance.
By the end of the decade, no single image could hold these histories. The Atlantic was both a physical body of water and a route through colonial violence. The “new Sweden” of the workshop book was a country in which its writers already lived, and a challenge to who was heard describing it. Moki Cherry was still making within a career that had begun long before critics gave Black speculative culture a new term. Eshun’s question about who controls futurity could sharpen attention to all these acts without taking possession of them. The next decade would bring works in Finland and Norway that named Afrofuturism directly. Here, the work of changing a future began with a closer account of what the present had concealed.
