This publication serves as an independent discursive companion to a transatlantic curatorial project that occurred in Nigeria and the United States—a project involving an architectural pavilion, exhibitions, performances, and symposia. Featuring newly commissioned texts and interviews the book also includes reprints from leading and emerging theorists, writers, and artists from the African continent and its global diasporas. Oriented towards a horizon of queer, decolonial liberation, the publication seeks to model alternative, non-statist spatial imaginaries, sociopolitical configurations, technological conditions, cosmological orientations, and aesthetic practices that exceed the current colonial capitalist world order. Multidisciplinary contributions respond on critical and poetic, historical and futural, and material and metaphysical terms to a series of urgent themes informing the global present. Incorporating visual documentation of artworks from the exhibition’s locations, the publication provides an Africa-centered queer, Indigenous, and technological lens to challenge and reimagine predominantly Global North-situated discourses on planetary futures.

KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. His writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices that respond to the world-historical conditions produced by colonial capitalist modernity. Abudu curated Traces of Ecstasy at the fourth Lagos Biennial and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (both 2024). Abudu is on the curatorial team at Swiss Institute, New York, where he has curated exhibitions by Nolan Oswald Dennis, Deborah-Joyce Holman, and Kobby Adi. Other exhibitions include Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York, 2023; and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, and Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2022. He is the editor of Living with Ghosts: A Reader (Pace Publishing, 2022). Abudu holds a master’s degree from Columbia University, a bachelor’s degree from Duke University, and was a 2022–23 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.