On the second day of the New Haven workshop, a film screening of 1745 prompted the question:
Fugitivity, running away, self-emancipation are acts of future-making, in two senses:
In the historical, for the enslaved person to forge a new future, there was a plan an idea of how the future would play out differently, a resistance to the white supremacist future.
In the archival, fugitive slave advertisements contain boundless possibilities and potentialities.
Representatives at the workshop from the historic Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses pointed out that their community of “free people of color” attracted people who had resisted and ran from slavery from its founding in 1821, one year before the colony of Liberia was founded by the American Colonisation Society in West Africa to resettle free Black people and emancipated slaves. Known as Little Liberia, or Ethiope, the history of the early Bridgeport community of free Blacks, American Indians and fugitives from slavery hints at how the futures past of indigenous and colonised people, Africans and people of African descent are entangled and shared.
C.L.R. James: Speculative histories.
In the data, the work that Mark Hedges and Richard Marciano are doing looks at the probabilities of different data being linked in reality. We can also think about probability more expansively in the probabilities encoded in data. Linking data offers up historical narrative in some ways, but also shuts down some of these potential and possible past futures.
In the museum, one way to represent potential futures / pasts is to add a layer of speculative history to objects — thinking through what might have been using different kinds of data about images. To emphasise the deliberate silencing of enslaved / Black histories by systems of white supremacy, but also to think about different visions of the future generated in images & acts of resistance.