Book Launch | Traces of Ecstasy

The Lagos launch of the new publication, "Traces of Ecstasy: Modeling Anarchic Pan-African Futures for the 21st Century" by KJ Abudu.

Please join us at G.A.S. Foundation for the Lagos launch of Traces of Ecstasy: Modeling Anarchic Pan-African Futures for the 21st Century, a new publication by curator, writer, and scholar-critic KJ Abudu. The book serves as an independent discursive companion to a transatlantic curatorial project, involving past G.A.S. artist-residents, that occurred at the previous edition of the Lagos Biennial and the ICA VCU, Richmond, in 2024—encompassing a site-responsive pavilion, exhibitions, performances, a reading room, and symposia. On the occasion of the launch, Abudu will give a presentation on the book's conceptual explorations, and will be joined afterwards in conversation with some of the book's contributors.

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

Mousse Publishing, 2026
English
Softcover, 16 × 24 cm
336 pages
ISBN 978-88-6749-753-9