Realities of Science Fiction II

Symposium

In its second iteration, the symposium Realities of Science Fiction II focuses on a multiplicity of narratives such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous forms of knowledge, and science fiction as a mode of resistance.

Through performative and discursive practices in the fields of science, literature, cinema and visual arts, different practitioners will question the current conditions of science-fictional imaginaries. Following its inaugural program in 2021, which centered on the composition of possible worlds, a more hybrid approach is now proposed, where fiction and reality intertwine. The ways in which dreams open up to other realities, ambiguous spaces where the border between reality and imagination become indistinct, and the entanglement of multiple temporalities are among the concepts that will be explored during the symposium. Science-fictional connections of key narratives will be addressed through the prism of non-Western fields of knowledge, such as Indigenous cosmologies. Significant portions of this year’s program will reflect on how Afrofuturism and Black imaginaries produce unique versions of the future.

The symposium takes place alongside the opening weekend of the exhibition Though it’s dark, still I sing, Works from the 34^th Bienal de São Paulo, presented at Les Forges from December 16, 2022, to March 5, 2023. Artists Amie Siegel and Naomi Rincón Gallardo, whose works are included in the exhibition, will also take part in the symposium, alongside speakers such as Arthur Jafa, Sky Hopinka, and Kara Keeling, among other.

Practical Information

From December 16, 2022 to December 18, 2022

The Tower, Level 8

Free entrance (upon booking)
Note: All conferences are simultaneously translated (FR > EN).

Friday, December 16, 2022

6:00 p.m.: Remarks
The Tower, Level 8
6:15 p.m.: Conversation
With Naomi Rincón Gallardo, artist, and Amie Siegel, artist.
The Tower, Level 8
6:45 p.m.: You Can't Dream About Dreaming Without Dreaming About Dreaming About Something
With Adam Haar Horowitz, PhD, Researcher at the Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Center for Sleep and Cognition, Harvard Medical School.
The Tower, Level 8
7:45 p.m.: In Conversation with Mami Wata #2
Performance by Josèfa Ntjam.
The Tower, Auditorium, Level 1

Saturday, December 17, 2022

2:00 p.m.: Remarks
The Tower, Level 8
2:15 p.m.: The Children of the Pond
With Sabrina Calvo, writer and artist.
The Tower, Level 8
3:00 p.m.: "It's After the End of the World (Don't You Know That Yet?)" Afrofuturism and Poetry from the Future
With Kara Keeling, PhD, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago.
The Tower, Level 8
3:45 p.m.: Break
4:00 p.m.: The Case for Dystopia: Evolution, Neurology, and Narrative in a World Gone Wrong
With Arthur Jafa, artist, and Peter Watts, writer.
The Tower, Level 8
5:00 p.m.: "Maabi-echi-zaagak, 'This Great Love': Ninawemagaan, 'Kinship' of Indigenous Futurisms"
With Grace L. Dillon, PhD, writer and professor, Portland State University.
The Tower, Level 8
5:30 p.m.: You Are the Dreamer, and the Dream
With Sky Hopinka, artist.
The Tower, Level 8
6:30 p.m.: Book Signing
The Tower Bookshop, Level 0

Sunday, December 18, 2022

10:00 a.m.: Remarks
The Tower, Level 8
10:05 a.m.: Science Fiction as Resistance: Radical Imagination in Critical Times
With Georgy Mamedov, curator, activist, and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, American University of Central Asia.
The Tower, Level 8
10:45 a.m.: From Fiction to Fact: The Case of ITER
With Nitendra Singh, PhD, Nuclear Safety Engineer and ITER member.
The Tower, Level 8
11:30 a.m.: Break
11:45 a.m.: Living with Huntington's Disease: Supporting Reality Through Fiction
With Valérie Pihet, researcher and co-founder of the Ding Ding Dong collective.
The Tower, Level 8
12:15 p.m.: Foumban Is Wakanda: When Africa Imagines Its Future Without the West
With Jean-Pierre Bekolo, filmmaker, and Pascale Obolo, curator and editor-in-chief of AFRIKADAA.
The Tower, Level 8

Jean-Pierre Bekolo

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Jean-Pierre Bekolo is a filmmaker. Through a committed practice spanning thirty years, he has explored numerous cinematographic genres with the aim of deconstructing stereotypes about Africa and its cinema. A pioneer of Afrofuturism, he explores science fiction, but also playful tales, thrillers, and documentaries (fictional and real). He has directed many films including Quartier Mozart (1992) (awarded at the Cannes Festival, Locarno, Montreal), Le complot d’Aristote (1996), Le Président (2013), Naked Reality (2016) and Les Saignantes (2005; classified by MoMA as one of the 70 classics of science fiction).

Sabrina Calvo

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Sabrina Calvo is a writer and visual artist. For more than twenty years, she has been working on an exploration of the materials of the invisible and the intimate, of fractures and healings, through tenderness, the absurd, and an inconsolable desire for grace. Sabrina has published at La Volte: Elliot du Néant (2012), Sous la colline (2015), Toxoplasma (2017) Prix Rosny Aîné and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (2018), and Melmoth Furieux (2021).

Grace L. Dillon

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Grace L. Dillon, PhD is an Anishinaabe academic and author. She is a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at Portland State University. She has coined the term Indigenous Futurisms, a cultural movement expressing Indigenous perspectives of the past, present and future in the context of science fiction and related sub-genres. Dillon is the author of Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (Oregon State University Press, 2003) and the editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012), the first anthology of Indigenous science fiction short stories. In 2023, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms will be published, edited with Siah Lavender III, Taryne Taylor and Bodhi Chattopadhyay.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo

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Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a visual artist. Her work constructs imaginary narratives, often inspired by Mesoamerican myths, stories and accounts of resistance against heteropatriarchal and colonial dispossession. In her stories, ancestral beliefs combine with contemporary aesthetic references, such as DIY and queer aesthetics, creating a universe that is visually saturated and abundant, but also familiar in its almost handcrafted construction. Some of her notorious works include Sangre pesada (2018), Resiliencia Tlacuache (2019). Her exhibitions include the Berlin Biennial (2020) and the Venice Biennial (2022).

Sky Hopinka

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Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.

Adam Haar

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Adam Haar Horowitz was in residence at LUMA Arles from october to december 2023.

Adam Haar is a scientist. He received his PhD from MIT, working between the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Medical School Center for Sleep and Cognition. He works to translate brain science into experiences and interventions, with a focus on sleep and dreams. He is a co-inventor of the Dormio device and Targeted Dream Incubation technique, which help people alter their dreams. Currently, he is building tools for nightmare treatment with psychiatrists at the US Dept of Veterans Affairs, co-organizing MIT’s Dream Engineering Symposium focused on scientific ethics, and designing a Dream Hotel with artist Carsten Höller. Adam’s work has been presented in Nature, Science, National Academy of Sciences, Harper’s, Cannes, and the World Economic Forum.

Arthur Jafa

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Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty and alienation" embedded within forms of Black music in US culture?

Kara Keeling

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Kara Keeling is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

Georgy Mamedov

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Georgy Mamedov is a curator, artist, and activist based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts at the American University of Central Asia. History and the practice of radical imagination are the central themes of his work. Georgy co-authored and co-edited a number of publications including the pioneer Russian-language collection of feminist and queer sci-fi Utterly Other (Bishkek 2018), the book Queer Communism is Ethics (Moscow 2016), and Bishkek Utopian (Bishkek, 2015) among others. In 2015, Mamedov became a chevalier of the French order of Arts and Letters.

Josèfa Ntjam

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Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer, and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film, and sound. Collecting the raw material for her work from the internet, books on natural sciences, and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage—of images, words, sounds, and stories—as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity, and race. In 2025, Ntjam participated in the thirty-sixth São Paulo Art Biennial and the MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain, Montreal, and her largest exhibition to date, INTRICATIONS, was presented at the IAC Villeurbanne. Ntjam has been nominated as a finalist for the 2026 Marcel Duchamp Prize, which will lead to an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in October, organized in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Paris. Solo exhibitions include swell of spæc(i)es, the official collateral event of the sixtieth Venice Biennale, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation (2024); Une cosmogonie des océans, LVMH Métiers d’Art, Paris (2024); Futuristic Ancestry, Fotografiska, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, and Tallinn (2024–2026); and Matter Gone Wild, Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2023–2024), among others.

Pascale Obolo

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Voici le texte dépourvu des balises HTML et correctement formaté : Pascale Obolo is a filmmaker-researcher, independent curator, activist and editor of the art magazine AFRIKADAA. She works on questions of transmissions and exchange of knowledge and experience. She questions memories, identity, exile and invisibility. Refusing to be reduced to a particular film genre, she produces and directs “filmic objects” including Calypso Rose: The lioness of the jungle (awarded the Silver Yennega Prize at Fespaco Festival in 2013). She also directs the African Art Book Fair (AABF), an independent publishing fair supporting qualitative and unique publishing practices in Africa.

Valérie Pihet

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Valérie Pihet is an independent researcher. She has developed a practice of experimentation at the crossroads of arts and humanities. She is currently a PhD candidate in political science focusing on the challenges of multidisciplinary evaluation at Université Paris Lumières. She was Bruno Latour’s collaborator with whom she co-founded the program of experimentation in arts and politics at Sciences Po Paris. Since 2012, she co-directs “Dingdingdong,” an institute for the co-production of knowledge on Huntington’s disease, which she created with the writer Emilie Hermant.

Amie Siegel

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Amie Siegel is a visual artist. A way to consider her work—be it a film, video, photograph, installation or painting—is to consider each piece as a case study. Siegel often focuses on the way things work, seeing through appearances and making visible layers of circulation, economic influxes, patterns of gaze and processes of constructing value. Her work is in public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London.

Nitendra Singh

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Nitendra Singh is a nuclear engineer with expertise in nuclear safety and design, working at the ITER organization as Project Associate responsible for the safety assessment of Tritium Breeding Blanket Systems (TBBS). He holds a Doctorate in Nuclear Engineering from Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI), India; a Master's in Nuclear Engineering from Université Paris Sud-XI, and Women in Nuclear in India association (WiN-India); and is a founding member of Women in Fusion (WiF) and InFusEd (International Fusion Energy Education).

Peter Watts

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Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, author, flesh-eating-disease survivor and (according to the US government) Undesirable Element whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on Space Vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 24 languages, has appeared in 32 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 59 awards from a dozen countries. His (significantly shorter) list of 22 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun.