Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)

Abstract

Between 11 September and 8 December 2019, Syrus Marcus Ware’s multi-channel video work Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future) was on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The video, created with Mishann Lau, features performers Kyisha Williams, Rodney Diverlus, Raven Davis, Janine Carrington, Ravyn Wngz, Gloria Swain, and Jasmyn Fyfe, imagines and stages a dialogue with a future beyond the current epoch of Black social death and insecurity and this time marked by the ever-present capitalist forces of greed and the persistent script of police and state violence. In this piece, written as a companion to the video installation, Ware not only meditates on the precarity of the present but also insists on the necessity for social change through an imagining of the collapse of capitalism and the radical time after with a social restructuring of forms of relations and care. This work draws on the Black speculative, futurist, vision of our ancestor, Octavia Butler, to sketch a radical Black queer imagining of the future—one that queers time, survival, family, and relations to articulate an abolitionist vision as the way forward.