AFROPOLIS 2025 | OTHER WORLDS

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There are Other Worlds, they have not told you of. They wish to speak to you. —Sun Ra

 

This year we gather again in Lagos for the 5th edition of AFROPOLIS (23–30 November 2025), marking also the inaugural volume of our journal, THE AFROPOLIS.

 

We exist in the aftermath, modernity’s grand project has fractured, leaving us to navigate a landscape shaped by colonial wounds, industrial extraction, climate collapse, and profound displacement. Yet from this rupture emerges our shout—to reclaim lost worlds, dance new realities into being, and speak forgotten languages back to life. Let us rewild our imaginations.

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Our curatorial theme OTHER WORLDS is a summon—a call to thinkers, artists, fugitives, makers, dreamers, coders, and architects. We seek your visions, provocations, meditations, and poetic rebellions. Guided by four Yorùbá cosmological pathways—Aiye, Orita, Orun, and Egbe—we invite you into a radical collective reimagining.

 

AIYE: THE LIVING

Physical Realities, Marketplaces, and Gathering Spaces

AIYE calls us into tangible realms where displacement reshapes our understanding of home. How does memory inhabit places we carry within ourselves? How can artistic practice document, reclaim, and reinvent spaces scarred by erasure? We seek reflections on embodiment, reciprocity with land, and renewed kinship with the more-than-human worlds.

 

ORITA: THE CROSSROADS

Fugitives, Portals, and Rites of Passage

ORITA beckons us to the thresholds of possibility—the uncertain middle ground where fugitives, nomadic bodies, and displaced peoples innovate cultures of survival. Here, non-placement becomes resistance, poetry, and innovation. Share your tales of navigation, improvisation, and courage at life’s crossroads, illuminating pathways of renewal and transformation.

 

ORUN: THE ANCESTORS

Afterlife, Legends, and the World of the Òrìṣàs

ORUN invites contemplation of ancestral presence, legendary beings, and divine guides. How can forgotten cosmologies and ancestral wisdom inform planetary healing? How do rituals, divinations, and mythical narratives restore balance and guide our futures? Works exploring spiritual portals that reconnect us to lost worlds and offer maps toward just and wise futures.

 

EGBE: THE KINDRED SPIRITS

Children’s Worlds, Wandering Spirits, and Alternative Realities

EGBE summons the kindred spirits, the children, the unborn, the unseen. Engage with speculative imagination, rewilded myths, and emergent languages necessary to build networks of solidarity and ensure collective flourishing. Offer visions of futurism and alternative realities that awaken other ways of being, knowing, and dreaming.

 

For this special volume of THE AFROPOLIS, we call on fellow dreamers to come meditate upon forced migrations, the politics of erasure, cultural survival, and sacred reciprocity with the earth. We invite explorations into fugitive technologies, hidden patterns, and multispecies alliances that propel us beyond survival into thriving collective futures.

 

Submit your bold interrogations, inventive narratives, visual provocations, soundscapes, speculative works, choreographies, poetry, digital experiments, films, and scripts that unsettle conventional wisdom. Join us as we choreograph worlds anew, activate new deities for new ages, and nurture radical hope.

 

Welcome to Afropolis.​

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Q.

Curator/ Artistic Director

The Afropolis

Lagos, 2025