♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Electronic music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Woman: Another take... [ Drum beating ] ♪♪ [ Humming, vibrating ] ♪♪ In front of the world, A boy, a black boy was gunned.

His hands raised, his eyes, his face.

His hands raised besides his face.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ The world's watching ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ They're all watching ♪ ♪♪ ♪ The child feel the shots through the night ♪ ♪♪ ♪ We're all watching ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Warbling ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Dismantling the master's clockwork universe.

Where is the master clock?

Who watches it and who keeps time?

If the master clock stops, does time stop?

Most people take our everyday experiences of time as a factual, unalterable facet of our reality.

There could be no practical way to totally askew linear temporal consciousness while remaining in this society.

If seeking to integrate into it or to at least peacefully coexist, compromises had to be made.

A split spatial temporal consciousness, one in parallel to that of the duBoisian double consciousness was thereby gradually developed in the emancipated African, what some have called "colored people's" or "CP time."

BQF creatives see this event as the second spacetime collapse.

There is no past.

Or rather, where does the line draw between the past and the present?

Was slavery simply over once declared?

At what time did we become free?

If time orders actions, when and where was the act of liberation?

When did subjugation end?

What time was it in the land my people were stolen from?

How far away from slavery are we when slavery as an institution was encoded into the dominant temporal order and temporalities of pre slavery and post-freedom superimpose, they collapse into one or the other.

Thank you.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It's actually difficult for me to think of when the first time was.

It was probably through Rasheedah's work with Metropolarity.

Just seeing Rasheedah read at different events throughout the city, and then subsequently learning that Rasheedah was also involved in a range of other collective activities through Black Quantum Futurism.

Black Quantum Futurism is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future's reality.

I was kind of struck by the multidisciplinary nature of it, that they were bringing together, like, visual art and poetry and fiction and community-based practices in a way that kind of revealed a lot of the interesting continuities between that work.

I was also interested in specifically kind of like, the mystique of thinking about time and space, and in a way that's definitively very sci-fi but also has clear sort of relevance to urgent social issues and how we can look to this reorientation of time and space as a way to reimagine new realities that are different from the ones that we're faced with today.

Phillips: Yeah, my path -- my path towards becoming an artist or claiming myself as an artist because, you know, really looking back, I've always been an artist, but didn't give myself permission to be an artist.

So my trajectory to, towards permission and giving myself that ability to call myself and claim that space was pretty convoluted.

For me, having a child at 14, again, because it had been also a cycle in my family where my mother had been a teen mother, my grandmother had also been a young mother.

My aunt was a young mother.

Really, for me, the focus became, how do I break this cycle for my own child.

Instead of, you know, again, going to college and sort of having the freedom to think about what I may want to do, I was extremely focused on, what's a practical career that I could have, so that one, I'm not working, you know, 80 hours a week to put food on the table for my child like my own mother had to do, which was one of the elements of why, you know, my trajectory became what it was, is because my mother wasn't around to really be able to raise me and to do the things that would help me to avoid certain traps that I became caught up in.

So I was extremely focused on a career or a job that would, you know, allow me to be home and spend time with my child, but also one that would give us the stability so that I wouldn't have to move around every, you know, year or so like my own mother, you know.

So I was really focused on shifting that cycle.

I put aside writing.

I put aside my interests.

You know, I was also interested in visual art.

I did not do any of that until, you know -- until it became -- until it felt important again, until it felt unavoidable, until it became something I needed, which would come later on.

And kind of one of the convergences of that was a friend, a fellow law school student, introducing me to Octavia Butler's "Kindred."

And that, for me, was a true moment in time of just like -- again, just eye-opening, heavens parting kind of moment of realization that -- again, back to this thought, like, Black people write science fiction.

Black people engage in science fiction.

I am not an anomaly.

I never have been an anomaly.

I took some creative writing classes at community college, and yeah, the rest is future.

In my kind of humble understanding here, is a kind of form of creative reformulation of Afrofuturism that kind of moves in a way from the space age to the age of quantum physics.

And it's a methodology that projects alternative futures and then provides the means of colliding those futures into the present.

[ Music humming, warbling ] How can we encode new temporal algorithms?

What does it mean to dismantle the master clock?

Physically, spiritually, psychologically, cognitively?

How do we access and take back control of our communal memories?

How do we begin to map our return to our futures?

There is a necessity to dismantle the master's clock and re-inscribe a colored people's time, or more affirmatively, to construct a new diasporic African spatial temporal consciousness.

There is a necessity to dissolve or dismantle the thermodynamic arrow of time and the arrow of progress.

Retro-currence.

[Echoing] Retro-currence.

A backwards happening.

[Echoing] A backwards happening.

An event.

[Echoing] An event.

[Echoing] Whose influence or effect is not strictly time-bound.

It extends in all possible directions encompasses all possible time modes.

I was also, had been reading a lot of a Amiri Baraka's work as well, and a lot of his speculative kind of works, and thinking about the future and thinking about inventions of machines and just like, all of this really cool stuff.

And that, all of that, all of those things combined was a moment of action.

And I remember writing about it, and I had a little journal, and I was trying out all these names.

I was like -- because I was also, I had been thinking a lot about quantum physics, and I was like, you know what I need?

What is the theory behind what I'm doing and how I think about time travel?

And not just thinking about Afrofuturism and time travel and that being the thing, but like, really, what are my guiding principles when I'm thinking about how time works in the stories that I'm writing?

And by extension, in thinking about in the stories that I'm writing, I'm thinking about it in world and in reality.

And part of that, you know, is thinking about the sci-fi collective that I'm in, which is Metropolarity, a queer sci-fi collective.

And one of our mottos is, "sci fi is reality."

And each of us kind of think about that very, very thin line between reality and fiction and speculation.

And so I was thinking about all of those things and Black Quantum Futurism kind of came together as really, a very literal pulling together of all of those kinds of principles that I think about -- which is Afrofuturism, Black people, quantum physics and yeah, all of those things in a pot, an intersectional pot.

Really, I mean, I think, the other important parts of it -- obviously, art is Camae's role in it.

And our first project together was her creating a soundscape for "Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales)", which I had self-published, and she created the soundscape for me, and that was really our first work together.

But it was such an important project, in thinking about what would later come to be Black Quantum Futurism because it was really a -- through the soundscapes, her translating these kinds of theories and these time travel experiments and these things into a sound.

And, you know, was another way for people to kind of enter my work through that sound.

And, you know, so it just, in and of itself represents this kind of time travel vehicle that her and I built together.

And again, it's the thing that would later become Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice.

[ Shaking rhythm instrument ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Phillips: Community Futures Lab was started as a way to document what was happening in a North Philadelphia neighborhood known as Sharswood that was undergoing a redevelopment project that included both eminent domain on about 100 or so homeowners and business owners that lived in the area, as well as displacement, both temporary and permanent, of low-income renters and residents who were living in subsidized and public housing in that area.

And so I live pretty close to the neighborhood.

I live about eight blocks from the area, in what is known as Brewerytown in North Philadelphia.

And I would drive by this neighborhood every day and knew kind of what was happening in the community at large.

Really, this just started as a space for creators, people who create with Afrofuturism and speculative fiction as a lens.

And I think it's really vital now that we have these conversations and that we connect in person, in the flesh, not just online, to really think about what's next for us together as a community.

This space is here to really engage with the Sharswood community in North Philly that's currently undergoing displacement and eminent domain.

This community is one of the poorest communities, not just in Philadelphia, but in the country.

And so we created the Community Futures Lab as a way to both amplify the voices in the community using Afro Futurist methodology and thinking about, having the community think about and engage with the idea of their voices being heard, in terms of what was happening in that community and that community's future.

Where, you know, kind of in opposition to that, what you would see being played out in the media and being played out in these conversations was that this community was implicit in its own kind of destruction, and that, you know, this sort of redevelopment project happening in a way that it did was inevitable, when that actually was not the case.

It was not sort of thinking about it on a linear, deterministic timescale.

It was not necessarily inevitable, and it did not have to play out in that way.

And music and history and all of these beautiful kind of cultural markers and activities happening in that community, but that was drowned out, buried or being erased by this redevelopment project and by the narrative that was attached to why the redevelopment project needed to happen.

♪♪ Also as a housing attorney at Community Legal Services, where I both provide direct legal representation to low-income tenants and do policy work at the local and national level around housing issues, I was also working with this community specifically, providing representation and doing policy work around some aspects of the displacement project that was happening.

[Chanting] No evictions without just cause.

No eviction without just cause.

No eviction without just cause.

No eviction without just cause!

No eviction without just cause.

No eviction without just cause.

No eviction without just cause.

No eviction without just cause.

Good afternoon, everybody.

My name is Rasheedah Phillips, and I am a member of the Civil Gideon Access to Justice Task Force and a managing attorney of the housing unit at Community Legal Services, which provides free legal advice and representation to over 2,000 low-income tenants living in private and subsidized housing in Philadelphia each year.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on Philadelphia's eviction crisis today.

In our City of Brotherly Love, every night, the shelters are filled to capacity with 3,000 homeless men and women and about 1,000 children, while hundreds more are turned away.

Philadelphia finds 900 or more of its citizens sleeping on city streets every night.

The majority of these people are young, Black single mothers and their children, survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault, physically disabled or experiencing poor mental health, while most of them face one thing in common -- they have been evicted from their homes.

Eviction is one of the leading causes of homelessness in the United States and in Philadelphia in particular.

No, that's a good -- that's a good thing to bring up.

I agree with you.

Okay.

[ Indistinct conversation ] You did excellent.

I did?

I was nervous!

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Shot in the back, shot in the head, shot in the dark.

Nothing but no justice.

♪♪ They gave Oscar Grant's mom $2 million.

Not enough!

♪♪ Not enough!

♪♪ To clean up all the blood, erase all the memories, the bury the bodies you keep sending our way!

Did you watch it on the news?

Phillips: The things that we have to overcome, you know, really adds to this idea of what a genius is.

Is this when you're, you know, going through so much and you still can persevere innovative, and, you know, invention of thought.

And I feel like that happens with music a lot.

When I said I start out with this nervous ball of energy, not then I'm afraid, but once I get that part out, it starts flowing, and now, it's out of my hands.

It's just, you know, an endless flow of energy and words, and I feel like that's when the genius happens.

And then 45 minutes, the 30 minutes is over, then I'm just like, back.

You know what I mean?

Kind of thing.

So I feel like it is like a ritual spiritual thing of, you know, letting go and just pouring out the things that you have been working on and thinking about.

And if those things are practical, that's the genius part of it, 'cause it's like, not only are we in all of this or interested in this, but we can also sit down and get out, you know, a pen and a paper and take down this information, and it's not backed by a price tag.

And I feel like that's the genius, innovative ways of sharing information.

♪ These people trying to stop my grind ♪ ♪ It was only a matter of time ♪ ♪ And tomorrow, I committed more crimes ♪ ♪ Trying to save my Black life ♪ ♪ By fetishizing my dead life ♪ ♪ What?

Get away from me ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ Trying to save my Black life ♪ ♪ By fetishizing my dead life ♪ ♪ Fuck, get away from me ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ You can see my dead body at the protest ♪ ♪ Trying to save my Black life ♪ ♪ By fetishizing my dead life ♪ ♪♪ Ayewa: So I'm in my bedroom making a cassette tape, and this guy who was getting chased by the police runs through my apartment, then also through my bedroom, and just doesn't say anything, just jumps out of the window and actually gets up and starts running.

So that was pretty intense, and me making a little punk tape, you know?

♪♪ [ Windchimes jingling ] Rasheedah at 125 Hanover Street, Is it still Hanover Street?

It's still Hanover Street?

Well, I'll just read this one.

It's called "Memory Bank," and it's about just like, everything that happened here.

It's like, "Open legs, candy apple lady scaling fish, Fish man, bloody watermelon, Kool-Aid, fried gizzards and fries, Chinese apple, brick cheese, powdered milk, Steak-Umms, liver and onions, Hamburger Helper, lima beans, black-eyes, crab cakes, bomb cake, pound cake, pig ears, chitlins, cabbage.

Tinky, Swamp Thing, Bella, Razi, Cinderella, Jitterbug, Peewee, Tweety Bird, Sissy, Lilian and Seal, Mad Dog, Batman, money.

Buck fresh, bones.

Bumpy and Pooby."

♪♪ A lot of the songs that I grew up singing, because there is like African Methodist, and this church...

I got to look at the plaque.

This church...1874.

So this is a historic landmark.

So they sing a lot of the old songs, like, a lot of the first gospel songs.

A lot of the songs were not just praises to Jesus, but they were ways to like, help people carry on stuff that they're dealing with.

Also hidden messages, also acting as a technology.

So a lot of those songs influenced me, stayed with me.

♪♪ ♪ For them to lynch our naked body live on Channel 4 ♪ ♪ Burn the live remains left on the dance floor ♪ ♪ They still turnin' up, 'cause it's lituation ♪ ♪ Hand up, don't shoot, that's your occupation ♪ ♪ Kill, Black girl, kill, that's my dissertation ♪ ♪ And if you can, drop a bomb on they plantation ♪ ♪ Just get 'em, hey ♪ ♪ Just get 'em, hey ♪ ♪ Just get 'em, hey ♪ ♪ This one for my newborn son ♪ ♪ Cherrie and Mary and James Baldwin ♪ ♪ They still turnin' up, 'cause it's lituation ♪ ♪ Hands up, don't shoot, that's your occupation ♪ ♪ Kill, Black girl, kill, that's my dissertation ♪ ♪ And if you can, drop a bomb on they plantation ♪ ♪ Get 'em ♪ ♪ Just get 'em, go get 'em ♪ ♪ Heyy ♪ Dedicated to all my Black and Brown boys.

You heard me.

Ayewa: So, yeah, that's Havre de Grace.

I was born down the street, you know?

Same place all my family members were born, besides my parents.

In the time my parents were born, you weren't allowed to be born in hospitals, So all my aunts and uncles were not born in a hospital.

They were born in the house right up the street here.

The doctor had to come to your house.

You were not allowed to go into the hospital.

So, you know, even though my mom then later worked at that same hospital that she couldn't even be born in.

So that's pretty deep, the irony of that.

The irony.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Phillips: Yeah, so we moved around a lot.

You know, there were times where my mom had her own place, but times when she couldn't and we had to be back here.

I got teased for talking proper and talking white.

And sometimes I got teased 'cause my lips were big and sometimes I got teased 'cause my hair was too nappy.

You know, it's all of those things that contradict each other in all these weird ways when you reflect back on it.

But, you know, I don't think it was any more than anybody else.

I did experience a lot of sexual assault as a youth.

One of my sexual assaults actually was at this school, and another not too far from here.

I didn't know.

I didn't know that it was sexual assault.

I didn't know that it wasn't my fault.

I didn't know any of those things, and so, you know, I internalized that.

I didn't want to -- I was ashamed.

I didn't want to tell my mother.

It was something, in a sense, that was normalized, like, just way that men treat you or the way that, you know, your body's not your own, in a sense.

Those are, like, really hard, hard-learned lessons that I had to learn through experience and trial and error.

Or, you know, or that I was gay and like, didn't know.

I didn't understand that or what that meant or that that was okay or any of that stuff.

Like, you know, I wasn't thinking about that at the time.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Chimes jingling ] [ Wind blowing ] ♪♪ Black communities, we're time-poor.

Poor in the commodity of time.

Poor in the time and space it takes to dream about and envision the future, instead of planning how to get through the next day, planning how to get through the next week, planning how to get through the next year.

We're time-poor.

Poor in the commodity of time.

Poor in the time and space it takes to dream about and envision a future, instead of planning how to get through the next day, instead of planning how to get through the next week, planning how to get through the next hour.

We're time-poor.

[ Fading ] We're poor in the commodity of time.

Both near and far, both present in the now and not in the now, it's something that can break time in that it can reach back and pull into the present and reach forward and pull into the present, or even scramble that whole notion of forward and backward.

You know, I also think about that, but in sort of the simplest terms that I can think of, able to to break time in that way and pull all of these things into a now moment that just reaches and, like -- You know, I didn't know Octavia Butler.

Unfortunately, before she passed, I didn't know of her work, but it didn't feel -- you know, when I encountered it, it felt like I had always known it.

It felt like it had always been with me, in a way that a revelation is both surprising and something that feels right and like you've always known it.

So that's, yeah, that's what I get from her work.

And that, for me is, is prototypical of what genius is and what it does.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪