Afterlife Geographies | The Past & Other Dreams

In so far as the afterlife is accessed through the imagination, the afterlife situates what a future world might entail, and rearranges the pieces of the world, as we knew it, into a vision of the future. Afterlife Geographies considers sacred sites, sites of restoration, sites of reclamation, and sites of liberation.² The project is a chartings of language, movement, thought, speech, and action to develop structures that archive histories of community building. Afterlife Geographies documents “way– of– life” practices, in relation to processes of settlement, by which communities can articulate a world view, synthesize experience, and establish infrastructures of empowerment and remembrance.

Kamau Amu Patton is a media artist who lives and works in Brooklyn and Chicago. Patton’s work engages archives, documents, networks, and sites. His projects are immersive constructs and take form as expanded-field, intermedia structures. His works are temporary architectures made solid through attention, always becoming, continuing, and undergoing transformation. In 2020 Patton was Archive Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection, Patton created The Past & Other Dreams, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Patton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps, Second Mind | Alto Age, was released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. In 2022, Patton performed new sound compositions at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn and Basilica Arts in Hudson New York. In 2023, Patton performed, Dromeostasis: Input/Output, a daylong performance, activating Stan VanDerBeek’s installation Movie-Drome (1964–65) at the Museum of Modern Art during the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World.