In Helsinki and Bergen, performers and visual artists made futurity physical. A body could claim the stage, vanish into an image, or refuse the role prepared for it.
In Sonya Lindfors's Cosmic Latte, a brown artist can sit on a brown stage in the year 3024. The gesture is almost comically modest for a work that travels so far into the future. A seated body, rather than a spaceship, carries the question: what would have to change for that body to be received without an inherited explanation? In Bergen, Sandra Mujinga approached the problem from the opposite direction. Her 2019 SONW: Shadow of New Worlds offered shadow, camouflage and hollow textile forms as ways to control being seen. One artist claimed the stage; the other gave a figure room to disappear. Both made speculation physical, and both asked an audience to examine its own habits of looking.
Lindfors names Afrofuturism in Cosmic Latte; Bergen Kunsthall describes Mujinga's exhibition as drawing on Afro-futurist strategies. Their shared vocabulary does not make the works twins. One sets a body in the year 3024; the other experiments with how a body might disappear. Nearby, other Black Nordic artists confronted colonial memory through forms that reached for different questions. A stage, a hiding place and a public monument each alter a viewer's position in its own way.
The stage before the future
Lindfors's 2013 NOIR? began with the present tense of Black performance. Her project description calls it a journey into Blackness, Black identity, and performance on a contemporary stage, with ghosts from the past summoned into a macabre roleplay. The cast included Esete Sutinen, Ima Iduozee, Deogracias Masomi, and Lindfors. The title's question mark is useful. Rather than offering a tidy answer to what Blackness should look like for a Nordic audience, the work turned the question into theatrical material. Representation was no longer a matter of inserting a body into an otherwise untouched stage. The stage itself, with its inherited expectations, became the subject. In NOIR?, Lindfors worked on the conditions of performance that she would later send into a more explicitly speculative time.
Her 2018 Soft Variations also asks what a body may do without becoming an exhibit. Lindfors describes it as a score for brown performers, professional and nonprofessional, drawing on postmodern dance while unsettling assumptions about neutrality and contemporaneity. Its challenge lies partly in a word that appears harmless until the performer changes: neutral. If a stage has historically treated some bodies as universal and others as marked, a work about the ordinary act of occupying that stage can become a sharp intervention. The artist's record of Soft Variations names Esete Sutinen, Julian Owusu, and Zen Jefferson among the collaborators. The piece softly resists existing norms, making more room for what a body might do next. Its future is felt in a changed relation among performers, spectators and the stage they share.
The distinction between those works and Cosmic Latte is visible in Lindfors's own language. Premiered in 2018, Cosmic Latte explicitly identifies Afrofuturism as a framework for radical dreaming. Its imagined times extend to 3024. The work asks what it would mean for a brown artist to sit on a brown stage in a future where those words no longer carry the same social burden. The title refers to an astronomical colour name, yet its force on stage is social and corporeal. A beige universe is not offered as an easy escape from racial classification. Instead, the work proposes a space in which the relations between Black and white, present and future, might become less fixed. Lindfors's description puts Afrofuturism, contemporary art, West African cosmologies, Sun Ra, and Bach together. That is a deliberately surprising set of materials. It refuses the demand that a Black Nordic artist choose between supposedly incompatible inheritances.
The artist's project archive names Deogracias Masomi, Ima Iduozee, Pauliina Sjöberg, Geoffrey Erista, Erno Aaltonen, Jussi Matikainen, Sanna Levo, and Esete Sutinen among the working group. Such a list is more than a courtesy. Sound, light, costume and movement must agree, or productively disagree, before a stage can hold an unfamiliar time. Lindfors's seated figure is therefore supported by a company of makers. The apparent simplicity of that figure is a feat of collective construction, and the future it proposes has already begun in the way the artists work together.
A collective verb
The same year, Lindfors and writer and activist Maryan Abdulkarim premiered We Should All Be Dreaming. Their concept treats dreaming as a shared practice: part gathering, part lecture, part performance, part space for thinking together. The work is concerned with radical utopian and decolonial possibility, and its own description frames that possibility as collective rather than solitary. In Cosmic Latte, Lindfors moves a performer through speculative time. Here, she and Abdulkarim make the act of imagining a social event. The future is neither a secret revealed by an artist nor a finished picture delivered to an audience. It becomes something people can discuss, test and remake in company.
This move from the singular visionary to an ensemble matters in a Nordic context. A speculative future can reproduce the old hierarchy of who gets to speak while others illustrate someone else's concept. Lindfors and Abdulkarim treated participants' time and attention as part of the work. Their project description calls for listening and coexistence; its format turns those words into the labour of being with other people. The future is discussed in company rather than delivered from the stage as a finished picture. Its most demanding material may be the willingness to hear an answer that changes the question.
Nor did the decade's experiments stop at choreographic form. In 2019 Lindfors joined the Miracle Workers Collective's project for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, according to her work archive. The collective included writers, artists, filmmakers, performers, and curators with varied practices. A national pavilion can seem to frame such a group as a single voice, but the many skills needed to make its work tell another story. Lindfors carried experience from an explicitly Afrofuturist stage work into a collaboration whose ambitions and authorship were broader than one aesthetic name.
Invisibility as an invention
In Bergen in November 2019, Mujinga's SONW: Shadow of New Worlds opened with a very different proposition. The art institution's exhibition text explicitly says the project drew on Afro-futurist strategies. It describes a large video installation, sculptural and photographic works, an avatar appearing against darkness, and oversized hollow textile figures through which viewers moved. Where Cosmic Latte imagines a radically altered stage, SONW asks whether refusing to appear on someone else's terms could be a strength. The central issue is not mere visibility. It is control over visibility: the capacity to fade, camouflage, shelter, and return. The gallery's account connects that question to the political reality of the time as well as to a speculative future.
Mujinga's forms make the argument without a spacecraft. The Bergen Kunsthall description notes shapes recalling animal bodies, with trunk-like or tentacle-like elements, and relates them to survival strategies in changing environments. The analogy concerns adaptation: which ways of sheltering, moving or changing form become possible when the surroundings turn hostile? Coiling (2019) resembles a tent and may offer a hiding place. Green light recalls the screen whose background can be replaced, leaving figure and setting uncertain. A visitor moving among these works encounters concealment as a designed capacity rather than as an absence.
The gallery also describes oversized hollow textile figures through which visitors could move. That invitation changes the scale of the argument. Looking at an avatar on a screen is one kind of encounter; stepping into or around a figure large enough to shelter a person is another. A viewer must negotiate an edge, an opening and the space occupied by someone else's imagined body. Mujinga does not ask the visitor simply to admire an ingenious metaphor for protection. The installation gives protection a material difficulty: shelter has a shape, takes up room and affects how everyone else moves. In a decade when visibility was so often treated as an unquestioned good, the right to alter one's outline could feel like a radical design brief.
The exhibition also gathered work from earlier years. In Lovely Hosts (2016), travel images threatened to break into pixels after a computer virus. In Camouflage Waves (2018), figures became partly transparent against a wall. The difference between damage and chosen opacity matters. One image is made unreliable by a machine; another begins to withdraw on its own terms. Bergen Kunsthall describes darkness as a space of agency. Across photographs, figures, surfaces, light and sound, Mujinga turns that thought into an experience: a person may need to decide how much of herself a new world is entitled to see.
Mujinga's opening programme also makes the decade's international connections audible. The Bergen Kunsthall programme included FAKA, whose music drew on South African gqom, and GodXXX Noirphiles, whose DJ selections crossed several diasporic genres. Mujinga herself performed under the name Naee Roberts during the exhibition's run. The institutional record documents those events and a discussion, moderated by Samuel Girma, involving Mujinga, Jeannette Ehlers, and Christelle Oyiri. Around one exhibition, audiences could encounter sculpture, sound, performance and debate. Each brought its own history to the question of what can be made visible and what a person might choose to withhold.
Memory is part of the room
Ehlers's presence in that conversation helps define an important neighbouring practice. Her 2018 public work I Am Queen Mary, made with La Vaughn Belle, brought the history of Danish colonialism in the Caribbean into Copenhagen's public space. The work's account explains its reference to Mary Thomas, who fought for justice in the former Danish West Indies, and describes a sculptural body formed across the Atlantic through the collaboration of two artists. This is a work about how a city remembers, whose history becomes monumental, and who can author that monument. It is necessary to the wider story of Black artistic life in the Nordics. The work's own materials and stated concerns do not justify relabeling it as Afrofuturism. Historical redress and speculative world building can meet, but they do not become identical merely because the same artists share a room.
The monument and the speculative stage therefore meet at a difficult question without answering it in the same way. Lindfors moves a performer to 3024; Ehlers and Belle insist that Copenhagen's present cannot be understood without Mary Thomas and the history the city inherited. One work changes the time onstage. The other changes whose history can occupy public space. A future that forgets the latter would be thin, however expansive its imagination. The relationship is illuminating precisely because the works retain their different purposes.
The 2010s thus held two developments at once. On one level, a small but substantial body of work gave Afrofuturism a direct Nordic articulation: Lindfors named it in Cosmic Latte, while Bergen Kunsthall explicitly described Mujinga's SONW as drawing on Afro-futurist strategies. On another, artists such as Ehlers made interventions into the histories and institutions that shape what a Nordic future can mean. Their methods remained different. One development involved explicit speculative form; the other widened public memory and artistic infrastructure. Both shaped the decade, and neither becomes clearer when folded into a single slogan.
What changed by the end of the decade
The final years of the 2010s gave audiences three different demands. A Helsinki choreographer put a brown performer in the year 3024; a Bergen exhibition constructed an unstable field of avatars and protective figures; a Copenhagen monument brought an older colonial history into the visible present. Lindfors turned the stage into a site of collective dreaming. Mujinga made concealment active. Ehlers and Belle made historical memory impossible to bypass. Together, the works changed the terms on which Nordic cultural space could be seen and inhabited.
The next decade brought Copenhagen's Afro to the Future readings, a Malmö exhibition on Sun Ra, Stockholm's Southnord Artfest, and an Afrofuturist circus voyage. Each had its own makers and reasons for existing. What the 2010s passed forward was less a uniform style than a set of sharpened questions. Place a body in an imagined future, then inspect the stage that receives it. Let a figure disappear, then ask whether the disappearance was imposed or chosen. Put an old history in a city square, then ask who had been allowed to stand there before. Artists could take those questions elsewhere, and disagree beautifully about the answers.
The Afrofuturists archive follows these conversations through individual lives. Sonya Lindfors and Sandra Mujinga give speculation bodies and spaces of its own. Jeannette Ehlers returns a city to histories it can no longer afford to keep out of view.
