Opening Reception:
Saturday May 5, 2015
6-9PM.
Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit
Guided Meditations on Sunday May 6, 13 and 20 at 2PM
Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project outlines how to attain turiya, pure consciousness, in Hindu philosophy and investigates the theory that de-colonial futures can be created only when all trauma is cleansed from the body.
For this installation, Lafluer created a series of sculptures that utilize over twenty varieties of crystals such as pyrite, black tourmaline, amethyst, and bismuth, which she believes can heal traumas and help us transcend into the cosmos. The sculptural installation is accompanied by a sound essay that brings together the wisdom of Audre Lorde, Eartha Kitt, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
Transcending the human experience is the only safe place where futures can be imagined freely without limitation. LaFleur believes the map for the future can be found within the transcendent music meditations created by jazz musician and Hindu practitioner, Alice Coltrane. Inspired by the composition Galaxy in Turiya, LaFleur finds a kinship with Detroit born Coltrane and regards her as a Patron Saint of their hometown.
Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project
May 5- May 26, 2018
Popps Emporium
2025 Carpenter, Detroit
Ingrid LaFleur is a cultural producer, arts advocate, pleasure activist, founder of AFROTOPIA, and former candidate for mayor of Detroit. LaFleur has developed and organized art exhibitions both nationally and internationally with a curatorial focus on
Afrofuturism. In 2013, LaFleur founded AFROTOPIA, an evolving creative research project that investigates the possibilities of using the arts movement Afrofuturism as psychosocial healing.
Within her artistic practice, using sculpture, sound, site-specific installation and performance, LaFleur further unpacks ideas around trauma, which have arisen as a result of audience engagement through AFROTOPIA. She has exhibited in BOOM City Detroit curated by Dashboard Co-op (2015); the Something Else Off Biennial, Cairo, Egypt curated by Simon Njami (2015); Future Africa-Visions in Time at the Iwalewahaus at University of Bayreuth, Germany (2015-ongoing); Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College; Take Root Among the Stars at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
LaFleur has presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA),
TEDxBrooklyn, TEDxDetroit, Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany), Ideas City, New Museum (New York), AfroTech Conference (Dortmund, Germany), and Black in Design at Harvard University, among others.
LaFleur is based in Detroit, Michigan.