Architecting Fiction Futures

Film workshop

Abetenim Arts Village 
Abetenim, Ejisu-Juaben District, Ashanti Region, Ghana

Conference

College of Art & Built Environment, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology
Kumasi
Ghana 

“There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.”
–Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (Earthseed #1)

The year is 2117. Your grandchildren’s children play in incapsulated playgrounds. They suck liquid elixirs from tubes made from reconstituted waste. School consists of choicing into sections of knowledge acquisition. You trade a conversation for ethers. The sky is an illusion. 

Or maybe not.

Through sharing—ideas, solutions, love—we rememeber how we used to live with each other, provision wealth and welfare locally, and build resiliency. Technology can enhance our ability to connect and learn from one another. The future may hold a more egalitarian system of wealth distribution, built not according to the historically obsolete methods of resource extraction and exploitation of people, but rather of pooling the very best of ourselves as a species—the fragile and vulnerable parts of ourselves too—into a new world.

The continent of Africa has been posited to leapfrog beyond the ills and embraces of fossil fuel dependency for decades. Science fiction and its contextually astute Afrofuturism give credence to an opening into a world that contemporary western film, art and literature are just now beginning to embrace; a world where we actually figure out what it means to exist, and to do it together.

Does film have the ability to unite us? Architecting Fiction Futures posits this question as the first intervention into a global film platform called The Infinite Seed, which begins with two films intertwined in narrative centered around the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Seed Vault serves as an impetus for bridging narratives to every part of the planet: embedded within seeds are the narratives of thousands of years of culture.

During the time of our workshop, short films will be made in connection to The Infinite Seed. Together, we will explore new ideas, new perspectives, new formats, while also honoring the ancient.

Architecting Fiction Futures will take place October 20 through November 7, 2017 at Abetenim Arts Village, 45 kilometers from Kumasi (the second largest city in Ghana), with a three-day international conference between November 7 to 10 at the College of Art and the Built Environment, Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi, Ghana.

Workshop partners include Nka Foundation, School of Critical Engagement, Ghana Think Tank and Afrocyberpunk.

For more details on the program, click here.

Applications deadline: July 31, 2017

To apply, click here.

For more information, contact info [​at​] theinfiniteseed.org.