WELCOME TO THE AFROFUTURE

The Matrix of Creativity : Where the River Meets the Sea

In  a 1986 interview with Dr. Jerry Ward Jr. New Orleans writer and griot, Tom Dent characterizes New Orleans as a “matrix for creativity.” The fugitive praxis of syncretism ( the combination of different religions or religious traditions into a new form) manifests throughout the continuum of this land’s history from the pre-colonial Mobilian trading language created by the numerous nations indigenous to this estuary, the Kouri Vini (Louisiana Creole) spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans and Natives, to the spiritual invention of New Orleans gris gris and in the sound of brass, jazz, and bounce music. 

The cosmology of the Bambara, a Mandé people, who made up a larger portion of the enslaved population in Louisiana than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, is described in some detail in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana. “According to this cosmology, the universe, emerging from a moving void, undergoes a slow process of acquiring voice and vibration that eventually evolves into light, sound, creatures, actions, and human sentiments. The order of this universe is expressed arithmetically through numbers one through seven,  as is outlined in Cheikh Anta Diop’s, Civilization or Barbarism. Native to Mali and later stolen from the Senegambia region, the Bambara’s cosmology is designed to be transported across distance. 

In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson examines the Mandekan word woron. Meaning to “get the kernel,” it encapsulates the process needed to master speech, song, music, or any aesthetic endeavor. Thompson goes on to outline the Mandé concept of reason, which relies on a balance of opposites, badenya (the conformist) and fadenya (the innovator). It is this tension between tradition and innovation that produces a culture always in flux, always moving, changing, and reinventing the world.

For example:  the five hundred Black rebels in 1811 of various ethnicity, who envisioned a free New Orleans, a free Louisiana,  and an America free from slavery or the Natchez and Bambara nations, who just ten years after the Louisiana colony’s establishment,  conspired together to overturn it. It is both the retention of key African cultural concepts and the space and ability to innovate in New Orleans that makes the city the perpetual site of what’s new and next on the horizon. As such, The Matrix of Creativity : Where the River Meets the Sea holds space for both traditional and new interpretations of who and what kinds of figuration, abstraction and narrative constitutes the work, history, and legacy of Afrofuturism. 

Curator in Residence, Kristina Kay Robinson

Curatorial Fellow, Kennedi Andrus