the walker art center invited me to curate a film series this summer, and i decided to focus on Compelling Speculations on Human Survival.

(photo by zia brown)

 

since i was a kid i’ve been obsessed with three things:

– images of the future from the past, including but not limited to sci fi. as you’ll see in this series, these works are generally otherworldly;

– people on the precipice of apocalypse who choose to keep trying in spite of the despair, grief and overwhelming odds;

– the idea that we are the sacred thing we are reaching for, or that what we need is already around us, perhaps unseen or unacknowledged. we meet ourselves across time and space.

(photo by Zia Brown)

lately i’m also particularly interested in how radical, collective, spiritual and magical ways of creating change slip beyond our revolutionary fractals and into the mainstream. we don’t just need niche pockets of people engaging these ideas in shrinking containers of genre or tendency, we need blockbuster films and other viral, irresistible art that shows us imagining ourselves in the future, persisting, adapting, innovating and surviving.

i was especially geeked tonight because it was my first time seeing The NeverEnding Story on a big screen – it made me cry and laugh and feel hope and recommit to outdreaming the nothing.

the whole series:

Black Panther (last weekend)

The NeverEnding Story (this weekend)

Interstellar (next weekend)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Aug 1-2)

Contact (Aug 8-9)

thank you to pablo, mackenzie and patricia (and deb!) at The Walker for organizing all of this, and hosting us so well, and thank you justin for the series trailer! and thank you Zania for interviewing me and writing about this series. 🙏🏽❤️