Temp/rovisations: Imagining African Diaspora Time*Spaces

"Temp/rovisations: Imagining African Diaspora Time*Spaces" explores how artistic practices within the African diaspora reimagine the very fabric of time. Against the backdrop of a so-called "temporal turn", this project examines how film, performance, and installation art create alternative rhythms and temporalities that challenge colonial frameworks and linear progress narratives. Central to this inquiry is the original working concept of temp/rovisations—a fusion of "temporal" and "improvisation"—which introduces alternative vocabulary and methodological approaches for capturing the ways artists create fluid and shifting time*spaces through acts of improvisation and gathering.

Rather than seeing African diaspora time solely in opposition to Western traditions, the project foregrounds the creative force of improvisation as a method for producing new constellations of past, present, and future. By engaging in collective exchanges, peer laboratories, and archival explorations, it traces how these practices unsettle temporal profiling and open up decolonial imaginations of time. Much like jazz, temp/rovisations consist of selective repetitions, disruptions, and re-inventions—gestures that reveal temporality as both a mode of survival and a space of possibility.

Through this lens, the project highlights the improvisational character of diaspora practices as crucial to understanding Black existence and creativity, while inviting broader audiences to rethink how time itself can be lived, resisted, and re-shaped.