MARCH 2022

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Click image to watch full panel discussion .

Four international artists and scholars, Dr. Tiffany E. Barber, Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (ayo), Kite, and Jonas Staal,  discuss this panel’s titular terms in relation to their own work, expanding the terms however they desire, with moderator Safiyah Cheatam.

The term “speculative” has been applied to numerous fields of thought and action since ancient times. Aristotle and Plato debated the speculative nature of theory, versus the logical nature of praxis. The first 17th-century European settlers on the land we currently occupy in North America engaged in speculative finance to wrest land from its occupants, thereby colonizing it. In the last few decades, the adjective has been applied to more specifically visual fields of research, a development reflecting the term’s Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root “spek” – to observe. From Speculative Design, a term coined in the 1990s by Anthony Dunne, who along with Fiona Raby promoted the practice at the Royal College of Art, to the Black Speculative Art Movement with its roots in Afrofuturism, as described by Reynaldo Anderson in 2016, visual culture ignited the idea of this panel to discuss “Speculative Histories and Futures.”


For more information on the panelists, visit here.