We are thrilled to kick off the four-part Afrolution Festival series (2024-2027) with »African/-Diasporic Pluriverses I: Revis[it]ing the UN Decade for People of African Descent«! Here, we are taking the final year of the United Nations‘ Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) as an opportunity to revisit its past nine years, attempting an initial evaluation, and offering an outlook through exchanges of UN Decade actors with artists, intellectuals, and activists of African descent. These interactions will serve as a launchpad for the subsequent festival years. The curatorial principle of the Afrolution Festival remains that of historical retrospection combined with future-oriented revision at the »Triple AAA« interface of Art, Academia, and Activism.
Berlin, as the site of the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884/85 and former colonial metropolis, and today as locality and magnet for the international cultural avant-garde, as well as a city with complex (anti)colonial presences dating back to the early 18th century, is predestined for a cultural festival that thinks across borders and engages its dynamic African and Afro-diasporic civil society actors by connecting them with their peers from the African continent and its global diasporas. Thus, Afrolution positions itself in the tradition of historical international pan-African and anti-colonial events as well as in conceptual proximity to certain contemporary African/-diasporic and Afrofuturist art, culture and discourse formats. This year’s festival edition is dedicated to FESTAC: From mid-January to mid-February 1977, the Second World Black Arts Festival or Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) took place in Lagos, Nigeria. With more than 17,000 participants from over 50 countries in the Black world, it was the largest cultural event ever held on the African continent.
So let us attempt to produce new ideas, capture and convey the complexities and forces of our overlapping pluriverses of art, text, thought, performance, cuisine, body work and spirituality. Let us bond profoundly in order to take joint action going forward. Let us push the envelope, thinking up new practices and developing new methodologies. And let us celebrate that we are still here.
We dedicate this year’s festival edition to the Ghanaian writer, teacher and politician Ama Ata Aidoo and the Guadeloupean novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, teacher, and thinker Maryse Condé. Both are now loved and dearly missed ancestresses.