Edward George
POSTED: July 23, 2022
This week The Guardian had a long interview with Edward George, one of the founding members of the Black Audio Film Collective. If you don’t much (or anything) about them, then shame on you.
In it he point out that “If you want to fetishise futurity less, you have to go back to the plantations and to the slaves themselves: a lot of the songs that they were singing were literally about a tomorrow. These were cast in the metaphysical language of the day – that of the Bible – which was an act of mastery in itself. More than that, look at Italian futurism in the early 20th century: it opened out on to all kinds of fascism. You can’t have futurity, or futurism, or Afrofuturism, without some ambience of a fascist thinking creeping in.”
A suggestion: read the full interview, and then find some of their work and watch.