Martine Syms and the Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto

Martine Syms.

Artbounds season seven debut episode explores Afrofuturism and contemporary Black art. Catch the premiere Tuesday, November 17 on KCET and nationwide on Monday, November 23 via Link TV.

Artist and filmmaker Martine Syms dropped a bomb on the art world in 2013 when The New Museums digital art arm Rhizome published her piece, The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto. Its prose was a funny, direct, and irreverent take on the Afrofuturist imaginary that inspired a litany of cultural touchstones, from Parliament Funkadelics spaced-out 1970s jams to the recent project by Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts. Syms missive also combined elements set forth in the sci-fi genre-busting The Mundane Manifesto, a call to downplay the whimsical elements of space novels, which was conceived in the esteemed science fiction hub, the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She also infused ideas she had been playing around with while writing the character Chanel Washington, a young Black woman in 2050 Los Angeles, for a sound piece called Most Days.

In the Manifesto, she writes:

We did not originate in the cosmos. The connection between Middle Passage and space travel is tenuous at best. Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers, fourteen have been black. An all-black crew is unlikely. Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous communication grid can lead to an illusion of outer space and cyberspace as egalitarian. This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a master/slave relationship. While we are often Othered, we are not aliens.

Syms continues:

The Mundane Afrofuturists rejoice in gazing upon the bonfire of the Stupidities, which includes, but is not limited to, Jive-talking aliens; jive-talking mutants; magical negroes; reference to Sun Ra...

The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto took off, and Syms revisits the ideas in a new film on Artbound. The resulting documentary features techno producer Delroy Edwards, video artist Nicole Miller, curator Erin Christovale, and writer Tisa Bryant -- all L.A.-based creative individuals who came into contact with Syms as a result of her Manifesto, and all of whom embody many of her philosophies about the subject.

Below she speaks with Artbound about how the film came about, her publishing company Dominica, and how it all relates to the world today.

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You grew up in L.A., but then moved to Chicago. When did you come back here?

I grew up in Altadena. I went to Pasadena City College, and while I was there I worked at Ooga Booga. I transferred to Chicago, and then I moved back here in 2012 at the beginning of the year. I like L.A. Its easy to live here. I like to work inter-disciplinarily, and its a place where there are different things going on; its not really an art city. I like pulling from different industries and fields.

Tell me about Dominica Publishing?

When I graduated from college -- I went to SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago] -- I wanted to open a space like Ooga Booga. I had planned to do this when I was still in school, but that was crazy obviously. So, right when I graduated, me and artist Marco Braunschweiler, we opened this space called Golden Age, and towards the last two years, we started publishing stuff. It became a big part of what I did there. Id work with the artists; edit the books; design the books; and Id distribute them. We decided to close [Golden Age], because both of us were burnt out.

Martine Syms, text piece from the Belief Strategy series.

And then you moved to L.A., why didnt you reboot Golden Age here?

Even though I was from here, a lot had changed in the eight years that I had been gone. We thought about opening something else, but once we got here, we said, Lets just live here and figure out what we want to do. There was a book that I was supposed to do with Golden Age that hadnt been released. So that was the first thing I published under Dominica. So, I kept going, but just with the publishing side. Its all works with visual artists primarily, and its totally new commissions. Even though I say theyre about blackness, theyre not. Thats an inside joke; theres nothing that brings them all together aside from the relationship between me and that artist. I really just do two books a year. Sometimes one is mine and one is another person. This year was Black Radical Imagination by Erin Christovale and Amir George [who run a series of screenings and events under that name]. And the other book was an artist book for myself called Show Bible. Im working on the next two right now. One is a collection of performance scripts by a British artist based in Berlin named Hannah Black, and the other is by Sara Knox Hunter, a writer based in New York. She does these sci-fi poems.

Martine Syms, quiz designed For Badlands How To Download a Boyfriend.

A lot of your work is very graphic, much like what Paul Chan is doing with his publishing company. Can you talk about how graphic design plays into your work?

I really like Paul Chan, and I like what hes been doing with Badlands. Ed Ruscha was also a graphic designer, and Warhol -- there are a lot of artists who were graphic designers. When I was younger, I made zines in a punk independent community. Before I knew what graphic design was, I was making books and flyers, and then later I realized, Oh, thats graphic design. And I always made websites. So graphic design has always been something Ive been interested in since before I knew this formal language about it. And its something I still do for money, but its more fun to do it for myself.

How did the Artbound episode come about?

KCET Artbound did these shows with MOCAtv, and [artist] Khalil Joseph and I had done a video with MOCAtvs producer Emma Reeves. It was called Memory Palace. It corresponded with [Josephs] show that

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/martine-syms-and-the-mundane-afrof...
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