Writing, PublicationsKJ AbuduOctober 10, 2026

Traces of Ecstasy: Modeling Anarchic Pan-African Futures for the 21st Century

Writing, PublicationsKJ AbuduOctober 10, 2026

Traces of Ecstasy: Modeling Anarchic Pan-African Futures for the 21st Century (Mousse Publishing, 2026) brings together artists, theorists, and writers primarily from Africa and its diasporas to explore a constellation of experimental and contemporary approaches to ever-evolving discourses and practices of decolonization. The book serves as an independent discursive companion to a transatlantic curatorial project that occurred in Nigeria and the United States—involving a site-responsive pavilion, exhibitions, performances, and symposia.

Oriented towards a refashioned anarchic horizon of pan-African liberation suited for the twenty-first century, the publication seeks to model alternative political grammars, technological conditions, cosmological frontiers, aesthetic practices, and forms of life that exceed the statist and colonial-capitalist world order. The publication's contents respond on critical and poetic, historical and futural, and material and metaphysical terms to a series of urgent themes informing the global present. Featuring newly commissioned essays, interviews, reprints, and visual documentation of artworks from the exhibition’s locations, Traces of Ecstasy provides an Afri-indigenous, Afri-queer, and Afri-technological lens to challenge and reimagine dominant discourses on and visions of planetary futures.

Publication details:

Edited by KJ Abudu
Texts by KJ Abudu, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Olamiju Fajemisin, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Emmanuel Iduma, Evan Ifekoya, I. E. Igariwey, Sam Mbah, Nkhensani Mkhari, Chrystel Oloukoï, Kwame Edwin Otu, Raymond Pinto, Tabita Rezaire, Zoé Samudzi, Temitayo Shonibare, Roberto Strongman, Adeju Thompson, and Sophie Toupin.