FutureBrownSpace

FutureBrownSpace (FBS) is an artistic research initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, of being, of activism or community.) It also delivers platforms for institutional conversations around racialization in Sweden. 

 

This then, is a two-fold research in experimental black pedagogy based in performance practice and black study that hopes 1) to mitigate the subtle but pervasive violence that performs on thenon-white psyche in public and institutional Swedish space in the form of minority stress, unconscious racism, double labour et al… 2) to bring our intimate experience and ethnographic expertise of the phenomenon of unconscious racism into a healing pedagogic encounter with institutions and organizations.

The core of our practice is study – or you could say the core of our study is practice. The daily practice of being black or blackened. Because our study is the groove, the taste, the prayer, our scholarship, our moves, our lineage, our perfume, our roots, our looking fine, our laughter – our practice is black, black study, black consciousness, blackity black story and myth and historiography. It’s an “Is this black enuff for you?” ontology, distinct from science’s dodgy divisive methodologies, for anyone, anyone who wishes to appreciate, and join in its significance for a more coalitional less neo-colonial future; whether your access to it is through the brown, the queer, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, the transitional, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study. We do this through public seminars, workshops, performances, collaborations, institutional activism, community work, video work and through our publishing efforts at FutureBrownPress.

In Fall 2023 we hosted the Wednesday Seminar series A Season of Black Study at the Research Centre (see schedule below) under the theme A Festival of Black Thought and collaborate with Moderna Museet, Cinema Africa, Gothenburg Bienalle, Gulbenkian Theatre London, Etnografiska Museet and SouthNord AfroNordic Bienalle. In Fall 2024 we will host SKH’s first Black Studies Course; Black Study as Creative Process, at the Dans Department, present The Mothership is not a Metaphor at Moderna Dans Teater, and present the 2nd season of Black Study at Filmhuset.

The project is based at Stockholm University of the Arts, and co-funded by the Swedish Research Council.

The project ends in 2026