Black Quantum Futurism: CPT Reversal

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. It weaves quantum physics with Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound, creating counter-chronologies and grandmother paradoxes and envisioning Black quantum womanist futures that rupture exclusionary versions of history and future. This practice spans writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research with a focus on recovering, collecting, and preserving communal memories, histories, and stories. Through its work and alongside collaborators, Black Quantum Futurism aims to develop and enact a new spatiotemporal consciousness.

CPT is commonly understood as the acronym for “Colored People’s Time,” oftentimes a stereotype of Black people as chronically late but also a cultural understanding that events and experiences do not adhere to strict schedules and linear time. In physics, the same acronym stands for “charge, parity, and time reversal,” a fundamental symmetry of laws that holds for all physical phenomena. Intrigued by this double meaning of CPT, Black Quantum Futurism seeks to examine time and temporality at various scales and dimensions—personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and cosmic time—and their connections and reverberations through new and rearranged videos, collages, maps, sounds, and other visual works. Simultaneously, it aims to make visible the temporal meridians that connect, distort, and mirror each other, depending on one’s arrival or location on the timeline. CPT Reversal serves as a preview to the longer-term research project CPT Symmetry and Violations with the Collide Residency at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).