Africa is the Future by Nicolas Premier at the SBC Gallery

Africa is the Future: Echoes and Responses by Nicholas Premier, a Franco-Congolese artist, currently on view until November 11th, 2024, at the SBC Gallery, is a 20-year project in the making focused broadly on decolonizing the perceived idea of “Africa” while citing the African diaspora and its possible futures (ode to Afrofuturism). Explored through a variety of mixed media from film and videography, magazine covers, printed t-shirts, music, and mantra, Premier calls for the diasporas return to the continent while reclaiming a narrative of identity and geography that had been stripped away from them. 

Still from Nicolas Premier, AFRICA IS THE FUTURE, 2020, video, 31 minutes and 50 seconds, SBC Gallery, Montréal, QC.

The project's conception began with the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Premier was particularly interested in its media coverage, a coverage that was wholly absent from the ongoing Congolese civil war that occurred between 1998-2003. Premier’s work thus focused on inversing the lack of black bodies within any kind of media, from political to popular. Reappropriation and reidentification is central to his work in attempts to foster a context of possible futures for the growing diaspora, noted by the repetition of ‘2034’ in his work. 

Thanks to the SBC Gallery, who specializes in merging the social with the political in order to bring forth decolonial and diasporic narratives within the Montréal artistic community, Africa is the Future: Echoes and Responses is an interactive space meant to encourage deliberations of possibilities for the African diasporic future and its past outside of a colonial narrative.