03 Nov 2025
Quantum Temporalities: Black Quantum Futurism and the Art of Time Travel
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
“We create for what is present and what is not present in reality, servicing the fluxes of space and time. We interact with the unknown frequencies that entangle with everyday life. We honor the perpetual, mental, and temporal world of the listener or participant.”
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) operates at the edge where quantum physics meets Black diasporic temporality, where science fiction’s radical estrangements collide with communal memory, ritual, and spatial justice. Founded by Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips, the collective has, for over a decade, developed an expansive practice that moves fluidly across music, performance, installation, zine-making, and speculative writing. Their work asks: What would it mean to reclaim time itself from the linear, colonial, and capitalist regimes that govern its flow? What new chronologies might emerge if we could bend the arrow of time, multiply its pathways, or let it circle back on itself?
Science fiction becomes, for BQF, less a literary genre than a set of tools for temporal insurgency. World-building, counterfactual histories, time loops, multiverse logics — these devices migrate from the page into sound installations, participatory workshops, and immersive environments. They do not remain metaphors. Rather, they function as real-world methodologies for dismantling oppressive timelines and imagining alternative futures rooted in Black lived experience. This speculative approach owes much to authors such as Octavia E. Butler, whose novels offered blueprints for nonlinear, recursive, and multi-stranded temporalities. BQF treats sound not only as a medium of expression but as a technology of time travel, capable of opening portals, dilating moments, and synchronizing collective rhythms. Crucially, the future in BQF’s lexicon resists dystopian inevitability.
In the conversation that follows, Black Quantum Futurism discusses how science fiction methodologies, quantum theory, and Black temporal consciousness coalesce in their practice — and how art can help us inhabit time otherwise.
Alexander Burenkov: When you describe Black Quantum Futurism, what specific science-fiction methodologies— world-building, counterfactual history, time loops, multiverse logic—do you consciously import into your artistic process?
Black Quantum Futurism: All of the above. What brought us together was our shared passion for quantum physics, time, astronomy, philosophy, speculation, myth, matrilineal societies, spirituality, and the pursuit of social justice for Black people. These dialogues catalyzed further creative explorations. We began experimenting across mediums, including writing, sound, zines, collages, and experimental videos, and from those projects, the core principles of BQF emerged. They were forged through an amalgamation of quantum physics, the temporal consciousness of the Black and African diaspora, and Black spatialities. World-building, counterfactual history, time loops, and multiverse logic all become practical tools for us. We don’t just treat them as purely speculative devices but they are real-world methodologies for dismantling oppressive, hegemonic timelines and for imagining temporalities that can hold Black lived experiences. Through these methods, we reframe history and memory, and we open portals to futures that have been denied or foreclosed. In adopting ‘futurism’ as a central term, BQF intentionally navigates the future as a multifaceted expanse, entangled with multiple temporal dimensions. The Latin root of the word futurus, meaning to grow or to become, grounds our understanding of the future as an active and generative process that always implicates the past and present. This perspective allows us to co-create time and communal temporalities rather than take for granted the linear progressive of time.
Alexander Burenkov: Many sci-fi authors use ‘estrangement’ to make the present visible. How do your installations and performances engineer estrangement in order to reframe everyday Black temporalities?
Black Quantum Futurism: We create for what is present and what is not present in reality, servicing the fluxes of space and time. We interact with the unknown frequencies that entangle with everyday life. We honor the perpetual and mental and temporal world of the listener or participant.
Alexander Burenkov: Your practice often collapses past, present, and future. Which speculative texts or theories have most shaped your approach to non-linear time, and how do you translate them materially into sound, text, or spatial design?
Black Quantum Futurism: Octavia Butler’s work, particularly Kindred but truly her entire catalogue, has been foundational to my approach to non-linear time. In 2014 we created an album of soundscapes based on audiobooks of her stories, Constellation 8/∞ – Sonic Celebration of Octavia Estelle. It samples from Butler’s Kindred, Dawn (Xenogenesis I), Parable of the Sower, Fledgling, Wild Seed, and Mind of My Mind, layering her words and voice into an audio collage that entangles on the many worlds she imagined. The title and structure reference both the Latin roots of her names, Octavia and Estelle, and the eight-track composition, a gesture of wordplay and devotion. As an early experiment in sound composition, Constellation 8/∞ was crucial in shaping how BQF understands speculative practice. Through layering and distortion of sound, samples, and spoken word, we began tuning time as something pliable, recursive, and multiple. This method of composing with fragments—whether audiobooks, field recordings, or voices—translates Butler’s speculative timelines into sonic form, creating temporalities that resist linear progressions. From our home studio to the labs at CERN, BQF has extended this approach, critically and poetically attuning the interrelationships between samples, scales, notes (both musical and quantum mechanical), and the socio-politics they carry. These practices draw from quantum theory as well as the continuum of Black diasporic music and writing, weaving richly intertextual auralities and oralities to create a material translation of speculative theory into sound and space.
Alexander Burenkov: In your solo exhibition Bending the Arrow of Time into a Circle at Kunstverein Nürnberg — Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, you used locally-sourced mirrors, plants, radios, clocks, fountains, as well as new sound and video works by Black Quantum Futurism to create four zones for diverse experiences of perceiving time and interaction. How was the exhibition’s scenography constructed, and how did you engage with the site-specificity of the space?
Black Quantum Futurism: The installation was envisioned as a multi-room, multi-sensory environment that explored nonlinear time through sound, reflection, water, plants, and radios. Working with the site, we treated each space as a portal into a different temporal dimension, allowing visitors to move through shifting perceptions of time. The site-specificity came through embracing both the architecture of Kunstverein Nürnberg and its neighborhood, transforming familiar materials into living archives and interactive experiences that reflected the fluidity of time itself. Mirrors, fountains, plants, clocks, and sound were locally sourced and reassembled to create four distinct zones—Mirror Time, Water Time, Plant Time, and Sonic Time. Each room drew on specific temporal metaphors: reflection, memory, growth, and distortion. Together they formed an interconnected scenography that encouraged cyclical engagement, challenging rigid separations of past, present, and future.
Alexander Burenkov: A deep hum and meditative sounds, occasionally interrupted by chiming bells, filled the exhibition rooms, prompting self-reflection and contemplation on the mutability of time. How do deep sonic vibrations and somatic experiences of sound challenge linear time? And what role does sound healing play in your practice?
Black Quantum Futurism: Creating place-based work where the listener has agency to interact at one’s own pace is one way of challenging linear time. Creating moment works where sound is continuous and located in space. When creating works that do not need a listener to exist, it is very liberating.
Alexander Burenkov: One of the exhibition halls—Room IV—explored growth, decay, and cyclical interconnection through a collection of plants and herbs forming a living archive: an emblem of plant consciousness and the slow rhythm of botanical time, which resembles a spatial embodiment of ‘vegetal time,’ as Michael Marder would say. What are your practical suggestions for attuning to the temporal regimes of plants?
Black Quantum Futurism: It begins with understanding that we are co-existent with plants. They are part of our homes, part of our bodies, essential to our breathing, and integral to our ecosystems. These processes mirror African and Indigenous epistemologies, which describe time and space as fluid, cyclical, and interdependent rather than fixed and linear. The project builds from these principles and connects them to reparative practices that emphasize relationality, interconnection, and adaptability as strategies for addressing injustices rooted in dispossession and colonial temporalities. By drawing attention to how plants and water organize themselves in time and space, the work proposes alternative ways of being together that foreground reciprocity and resilience. The theoretical grounding of that particular spacetime (Room IV) was definitely inspired in part by Michael Marder’s writings on plant time. His framing helps us gesture toward a proposition for how Black and Indigenous temporal and spatial traditions and epistomologies can guide us toward forms of justice that are grounded in nonhuman worlds.
Alexander Burenkov: Your new outdoor sculpture enters into dialogue with the Kunstverein Nürnberg’s neighborhood as a communal meeting point. How will the experiences, memories, and thoughts of residents be integrated alongside contributions from invited guests? What is the origin of the patterns in this public art project, and how do they reference Leon Howard Sullivan (1922–2001), the U.S. pastor and activist who founded Progress Aerospace Enterprises in 1968—the first Black-owned aerospace agency?
Black Quantum Futurism: This project connects the legacy of Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s work in spatial justice, from housing in North Philadelphia to broader struggles for civil rights and economic justice, with the Black community’s overlooked contributions during the space race. Sullivan’s founding of Progress Aerospace Enterprises, one of the first Black-owned aerospace companies to manufacture parts for NASA spacecraft, exemplifies the intersection of civil rights and cosmic exploration. Yet this notion of ‘progress’ was not without complications, since the company was also enlisted to build weapons and became deeply entangled with corporate powers such as GE, which actively upheld apartheid. These contradictions are central to the work. We explored this in detail in the original iteration of this project called Black Space Agency back in 2018.
The labyrinth is envisioned as a communal meeting point and a symbolic structure, sitting at the intersections of nature, dirt, trees, and concrete, roads and cars. It is proposed as a site where residents and invited guests walk, reflect, and contribute their own experiences. Its patterns emerge from archival research into Black involvement in the U.S. Space Race. In this way, the work integrates local voices alongside global histories, acknowledging the entanglement of technological progress, racial justice, and corporate power. As a form, the labyrinth references Black temporalities and ways of being in relationship to land, space, and time while also pointing toward our contemporary ecological urgencies. For example, current scientific studies show that polar ice melting caused by global warming is altering the Earth’s rotation and lengthening the day, which reminds us that time itself is not fixed but shifts under human impact. By calling for a return to natural time cycles and Black communal traditions of timekeeping, the installation foregrounds both resilience and warning around the dangers of spatial and temporal displacement under climate change, and the necessity of collective memory and community as guides through these times and journeys.
Alexander Burenkov: In BQF, community archiving sits beside speculative fabulation. How do you prevent the archival record from hardening into a fixed canon while still enabling open futures in your narratives?
Black Quantum Futurism: For us, the archive is never something fixed. We see community archiving as a living practice, always being reactivated through sound, performance, writing, and ritual. It is less about preserving history as a closed canon and more about treating the archive as a kind of temporal portal, one that opens onto multiple timelines, possibilities, and voices. By weaving archival material together with speculative fabulation, we keep the record open, cyclical, and always in dialog with the present and the future. Our work Project: Time Capsule explores this in more detail.
Alexander Burenkov: At Performance Space New York, you presented The Memory Vortex Inn (Sep 2024 – Jun 2025) as an immersive, year-long sanctuary of speculative imagination—part lounge, part inn, part creative convening. Elements included the Oral Futures Jookbox for recording memories or future visions, interactive clock sculptures, a synth lab, library, and spontaneous performance zones. Collaboration is central to your work: what does co-authorship mean inside a speculative framework where characters, communities, and archives co-generate the narrative?
Black Quantum Futurism: For us, co-authorship means creating frameworks where the narrative is never fixed and is always shaped in real time by the people who enter the space. A key example is our series of bio clocks, which challenge how we collectively engage with clock time. At Manifesta 13 in Marseille, we built a large-scale bio clock as part of a communal stage in front of Palais Longchamp. Designed with three entangled circles drawn from cosmograms the installation responded to each visitor’s movements, synchronizing individual and collective rhythms. Instead of numbers, the dials pointed toward past, present, and future, creating a platform that held multiple communal, personal, and global temporalities at once. We carried this approach into The Memory Vortex Inn at Performance Space New York. There, an interactive dial within a stage was activated through performances, workshops, and discussions. The dials served as astrolabes and cosmograms, connecting multiple cultural temporalities, cosmologies, events, and geographies. Motion sensors allowed them to move with different rhythms, so that visitors’ actions directly shaped the temporal atmosphere of the space. In both cases, authorship is distributed across people, communities, and archives. The scenography provides the framework, but the narrative is co-generated through participation, memory-sharing, and improvisation. This is how we hold open futures inside our speculative practice. We cocreate spaces for collective agency, where time itself becomes something made, remade, and lived together.
Alexander Burenkov: Your practice deploys sound and voice as engines of time travel. What are the sonic equivalents of jump cuts, time dilation, or wormholes in your compositions and listening spaces?
Black Quantum Futurism: It is in what is not said, what is not heard. The work starts in the spaces.
Alexander Burenkov: In your workshops, groups create communal quantum event maps to examine how communities construct shared time around past, future, or present events. Personal quantum event maps allow participants to revisit pasts, plan futures, or reframe ‘nows.’ What have you learned from these exercises about collective vs. individual temporalities?
Black Quantum Futurism: We learn that across continents and time zones our journeys are all entangled and we all are in need of a practice towards collectively envisioning liberated futures.
Alexander Burenkov: In science fiction, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches often map onto scientific rigor vs. mythopoesis. How do you calibrate empirical references (physics, astronomy) with ritual, poetry, and oral knowledge without hierarchizing them?
Black Quantum Futurism: We follow and research deeply what we are interested in or building a collection of work around. We love hard science fiction and are even more interested in myth, ritual and folklore. It all comes from a place of truth and scholarship where hierarchical or categories are not needed.
Alexander Burenkov: If you could commission a speculative device for public space—something realistically buildable—what would it do to redistribute time, attention, or memory in a neighborhood under pressure?
Black Quantum Futurism: I would say it is what we are already with our grandmother clocks but we would love to do it on a larger scale with many cities activated together across space and time.
Alexander Burenkov: Many sci-fi texts are cautionary. How do you avoid dystopian inevitability when engaging with gentrification, surveillance, or climate collapse, and instead script actionable alternative timelines?
Black Quantum Futurism: Black Quantum Futurism is a theory and practice. The practice is important and reminds us that through thoughtful and meaningful intentions, with consistency possible outcomes reveal themselves. The Quantum field and potentiality, a philosophy of many worlds and parallel universes are an interest to us.
Alexander Burenkov: What does reader/viewer literacy look like in your exhibitions? Do you expect audiences to ‘read’ the work like a novel—through clues, indices, appendices—or to experience it somatically first?
Black Quantum Futurism: Our exhibitions are a nonlinear experience. We understand learning comes through many different forms and experiences. We allow the audience agency and allow them space to construct their own rhythm of pacing to experience the exhibit.
Alexander Burenkov: Finally, if BQF were to publish a Field Manual for Temporal Liberation, what three exercises would it include for artists and communities to practice speculative time in daily life?
Black Quantum Futurism: Memory practices would be a great start leading to writing and mapping experiences. Exercises from our Temporal Repair Clinic. Finishing with DIY (do it yourself) time travel experiments.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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