The Venice Edition: The BLACK city Astrolabe
Imagine a network comprised of points and lines extracted from events and movements in settlements and cities outlining the African diaspora. Within it, envision a constellation unearthing the lives of “Black” women from the 15th century to today.
From the multiple displacements of race and gender, enter the Black City Astrolabe, a space-time field comprised of a 3-D map and 24-hour cycle of narratives that reorder the forces of subjugation, devaluation, and displacement through the spaces, events of African diasporic women.
The Diaspora Map traces the flows of descendants of Africa (whether voluntary or forced) Atop the visible tension between the mathematical regularity of meridians of longitude and the biases of international date lines.
An anchor to the Black city Editions, the timeline represents a chronological ordering of time and space that map the legal and extralegal structures that have affected the settlements of African descendants within a linear graphic system of horizontal movements and vertical events revealing simultaneous time-scapes and patterns over time.
In this moment we are running out of time. The meridians and timeline decades are indexed to an infinite conical projection metered in decades. It structures both the diaspora map and timeline and serves as a futures cone to speculate on the probable, plausible, possible, preferred and
The Black City Astrolabe is a vehicle to proactively contemplate things that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. Yesterday, a “Black” woman went to the future, and here she is.