Realities of Science Fiction III

Benjamin Thorel is a writer, curator, publisher, and one of the founders of the Paris-based publishing house and bookstore After 8 Books. He regularly teaches, organizes, and participates in workshops and seminars about books and publishing practices in contemporary art. He has edited publications about the work of artists such as Neïl Beloufa, David Douard, and Piero Heliczer; he is also the co-editor, with Charlotte Houette and François Lancien-Guilberteau, of Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings by Amy Sillman, published by After 8 Books. In 2022, he curated a French edition of Dial-A-Poem, in collaboration with the John Giorno Foundation, New York.

Atheel Elmalik was in residence at LUMA Arles in september 2022.

Atheel Elmalik is a thinker, writer and filmmaker committed to the work of rendering black and African diasporic life on screen with specificity. She is interested in exploring liberated relationships of people to land and one another through stories of movement and migration, intergenerational healing, and connection to the sentience of the more than human world. 

Atheel received a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Stanford University where she focused her degree on African and Visual Studies. She then held curatorial fellowships at art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the Media and Performance Art department, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. After spending the last two years assisting and managing artist Arthur Jafa’s studio in Los Angeles, she is currently developing her first narrative film through Jafa’s newly formed film studio, SunHaus, which she will be working on while in Arles. 

Eden Tinto Collins (she/they/us) has developed her practice of visual arts through the National School of Fine Arts in Paris Cergy. Poet, hypermedia, and -trobairitz, she explores the notions of networks and interdependence, f.r.ictions between melancholy, mythology, and post-, trans-, and cyber-humanity. Their devices are relational, noetic (to connect the thought and the spirit), and are translated by sound, voice, installation, video, and performance. Her first narrative, Bonne Arrivée, was published in July 2021 as part of the Fraîches Fictions collection. Since 2021, Eden Tinto Collins has been developing, in partnership with Societies and the Worms Prestige association, acéphale studio, an alternative space for residencies and workshops in Joinville-le-Pont, as well as a production structure at the initiative of several in situ projects such as Numin (a space opera) and A Pinch of Kola (a quantum sitcom).

Isiah Lavender III is the Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. He is the author/editor of seven books, including Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (2019), the interview collection Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson (2023), and the co-authored Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2023). His current book project, Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction, is now under review. Likewise, he is attempting to start a university press book series entitled Otherhoods. Finally, he edits for Extrapolation—the oldest science fiction academic journal—as one of its six editors.

Michael Roch (b. 1987, Lyon, France) is a science-fiction writer and screenwriter. His new novel, Les Choses immobiles, incandescence d’une littérature du marronnage, is published by Label Mu (2023). Since 2015, he has led several writing workshops on the theme of Afrofuturism—a literary movement developing Afrocentric counter-dystopias—in prisons and universities. Today, he leads Latilié, a creative writing workshop dedicated to the literature of the imagination on Twitch. He teaches storytelling in higher education and at the University of the West Indies. He is also a member of the Fabrique décoloniale. He lives in Martinique.

Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952) is an American science-fiction author. With twenty-two novels along with a variety of short stories, he is most acclaimed for his Mars trilogy and his book The Ministry for the Future. His literary works, which have been translated into twenty-four languages, often weave in elements of economics, ecology, culture, and politics, frequently casting scientists in the role of protagonists. He has won many prizes over the course of his career, including the Hugo (1997) and Nebula (1994 and 2013) Awards for Best Novel, as well as the World Fantasy Award (2013). The New Yorker has recognized him as one of the preeminent science-fiction authors alive today.

Shazeda Ahmed is a researcher in information studies. She is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Race and Digital Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles. She graduated with a PhD from the University of California Berkeley School of Information. Previously, she has been a researcher at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the AI Now Institute. Ahmed was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University in Beijing, where she conducted field research on how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaborating on the country’s social credit system. Her additional work has explored emotion-recognition technologies in China, applications of artificial intelligence in Chinese courtrooms, and the epistemic culture of the emerging field of AI safety. Her work has been featured in outlets including the Financial Times, WIRED, the South China Morning Post, Logic Magazine, The Verge, CNBC, and Tech in Asia.

Neïl Beloufa (b. 1985, Paris) is a Franco-Algerian artist based in Paris. Through his practice, he questions society and its issues through various mediums: films, sculptures, and installations. Nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2015, his work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions in France and abroad, notably at K11, Shanghai; MoMA, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and Secession, Vienna. He also took part in the 55th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2013, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale of Contemporary Art, and the 58th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition in 2019.

Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and literary critic of digital visual culture and theory of emerging technologies. She is co-curator of the next Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Her books include Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail) and Fear Indexing The X-Files (Primary Information) with Steven Warwick. Her forthcoming titles are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries) and Kingdom (Primary Information). She has served as editor at Rhizome, Topical Cream, and HOLO, and as professor in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her writing has been honored with a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation/Crossed Purposes Foundation and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. She has further been supported by residencies at La Becque and Eyebeam.

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. She looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice, she examines the conflicting and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially connected project that traces extraordinary economic imaginaries to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2021; Taipei Biennial 2023; Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Programme; Transmediale festival; DIS Art platform; Berlinale Forum Expanded; and Geneva Biennale of the Moving Image; among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press as well as forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and MIT Press. She completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she held a SSHRC doctoral fellowship.

The first woman of African descent to receive the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award, which is a lifetime honor from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, Nalo Hopkinson is also the youngest person to receive this accolade. Jamaican-born, Hopkinson is the lead author of the House of Whispers comics series, set in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Universe, whose TV adaptation is now streaming on Netflix. She’s written five novels, including the award-winning Brown Girl in the Ring, and her writing often draws on Caribbean language and traditions. She’s been a Nebula Awards finalist and won a World Fantasy Award, as well as the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive LGBTQ representation.

Nicolas Giraud is an artist and theoretician. His work revolves around the construction and circulation of images. His art production extends into critical and curatorial practice. He uses visual and photographic tools to question the power of representation in environments that have become purely decorative. His work is part of various public and private collections. He is represented by mfc-michèle didier gallery in Paris and the Frank Dumont Gallery in Los Angeles. His work in the visual arts extends to his curatorial, research, and teaching activities, notably at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie, where he is a professor, and at Paris 1 La Sorbonne University, where he has been a lecturer since 2012.

Shahryar Nashat was in residence at LUMA Arles in 2022 / 2023.

Shahryar Nashat is a Swiss visual artist based in Paris. Focusing on our physical limits and the possibilities of extension, he treats digital and analogue technologies—from LEDs to stone and cast resin—as prostheses, props, or stand-ins. He has had solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago (2023), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); SMK—Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2019); Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt (2016); and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016).

Emma McCormick-Goodhart is a postdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose practice moves across media, timescales, and modes of inquiry. Her work explores the evolving nature of perception—particularly through sound and scent—as well as emerging technosensory futures. She has presented her work at the Glucksman (Cork), the House of World Cultures (Berlin), the Judd Foundation (New York), the Július Koller Society (Bratislava), Kunsthalle Zürich, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Montez Press Radio and Pioneer Works (New York), Storefront for Art & Architecture (New York), and other venues.

Her critical writing has been featured by adidas FUTURE Lab. She recently co-founded a research studio with perfumer Barnabé Fillion. She is also a member of the artistic faculty at Rose Choreographic School in London, which opened in 2024.

Zoë Dubus is a postdoctoral researcher in the history of medicine at the College of Arts and Science, Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She received a Banting fellowship from SSHRC for this research, which aims to rediscover the pioneering work of several women therapists who proposed new ways of practicing LSD-assisted psychotherapy in the 1950s to 1970s, before being invisibilized. The author of numerous publications, her research focuses more generally on the transformations in medical practices and health policies linked to the use of psychotropic drugs, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Her work aims to understand the relationship between doctors and psychotropic drugs, conceived alternatively as innovative medicines or toxic substances.

In 2016, Samuel R. Delany was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. He is the author of Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Dhalgren, Dark Reflections, Atlantis: Three Tales, the Return to Neverÿon series, his The Motion of Light in Water autobiography, and the paired essays Times Square Red / Times Square Blue. Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award for 2008. Further distinctions include the Bill Whitehead Award in 1993, the Kessler Award for LGBTQ Studies in 1997, the Nicolas Guillén Award for Philosophical Literature in 2015, and both the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Sir Arthur Clarke Award in 2021. He has also won Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and two Hugo Awards from the World Science Fiction Convention. Filmmaker, novelist, and critic, he was made a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2013, following in the footsteps of Asimov, Heinlein, and Le Guin.

Vinciane Despret is a philosopher. She teaches at the University of Liège and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Passionate about ethology, she has published numerous works, including La danse du cratérope écaillé (The Dance of the Arabian Babbler: Birth of an Ethological Theory); Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau; Bêtes et Hommes; Penser comme un rat; Que diraient les animaux, si… on leur posait les bonnes questions? (What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?); Et si les animaux écrivaient?; and Habiter en oiseau (Living as a Bird). She has also investigated the human condition, notably with Au bonheur des morts. Récits de ceux qui restent (Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind) and Les morts à l’œuvre. Her Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation (Autobiography of an Octopus and Other Tales of Anticipation), published in 2021, revisits the questions she has been exploring with animals, but this time in the experimental mode of fiction. These experiments will be taken up again in the fiction imagined for the catalogue of the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023: Living in Mycelium.

Mati Diop was in residence at LUMA Arles from april to june 2024.

Mati Diop was born in Paris on June 22nd, 1982. Since the early 2000s, she has built an eclectic body of work that has won awards at various international festivals. With her first feature film Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival followed by Dahomey (2024) awarded by The Golden Bear of Berlinale, she has established herself as one of the leading auteurs of international cinema and of a new wave in African and diasporic cinema.  

She grew up in a french-senegalese family, between a musician father, Wasis Diop, and a photographer and art buyer mother. She is the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the cult Senegalese film Touki Bouki(1973). Her nomadic, romanesque and political cinema which challenges the boundaries between genres and formats is an extension of her mixed identity.

Her formalist approach is rooted in an early curiosity for the fine arts, particularly video and sound. At the age of 20, she began working in theater, creating sound and video for plays. In 2004, she shot her first self-produced short film, Last Night. In 2006, she joined Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo’s artist-in-residence programme and research lab. After a brief passage at Le Fresnoy (National studio of contemporary art), she’s chosen to play the female lead in Claire Denis’ 35 Shot of Rum (2008). Her encounter with the French director confirmed her desire to become a filmmaker.  

And so begins the composition of a Dakar epic in three chapters that unfolds over a decade. Atlantiques (2009, Rotterdam Festival Tiger Award), A Thousand Suns (2013, FIDMarseille Grand Prix) and Atlantics form a manifesto that signs a political choice: a cinema committed to Senegal, with its working-class youth as its beating heart. From the phenomenon of clandestine immigration that devastated Senegal's working-class youth to the deposition of the Wade regime in 2012, and the disappearance of Senegalese and, more broadly, African cinema, which golden age was embodied by the subversive and political work of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty, each film is an archive of an era and its contemporary issues. For the director, cinema is a tool of reappropriation to restore  missing images, question degrading colonial representations and invent heroes who have deserted the African imagination. 

In parallel, the filmmaker made several short films, including Big in Vietnam (2011, Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival) and Snow Canon (2012, selected at the Venice Film Festival), which explore recurring motifs and themes of her cinema : the solitude of exiled bodies, cities and landscapes imbued with mythology and mystery, and nights from which dances and ghosts emerge. These themes are echoed in Tokyo Trip (2023), produced for Chanel, and In My Room (2020), commissioned by Miu-Miu. She continues her video practice with Liberian Boy (2015) and Naked Blue (2022), co-directed with Manon Lutanie. Between 2020 and 2021, she also shot two music videos in Paris, for Bonnie Banane and Wasis Diop, as well as a commercial film with Solange Knowles.

With the creation of Fanta Sy, a film house based in Dakar, she pursues her artistic commitment on the African continent.