This interview is not the first time Ingrid LaFleur and Rasheedah Phillips have shared space across physical or virtual realms. From July to October of 2019, LaFleur curated the large-scale interactive art exhibit Manifest Destiny, for which a number of prominent Afrofuturist artists contributed work. Phillips participated by giving a lecture titled “Quantum Womanist Futures,” Phillips fused ideas from art, history, and physics, and notions of nonlinear time to address the presence of Black women across overlapping iterations of the past, present, and future. More recently, from March to June 2020, LaFleur moderated a series of digital conversations called “What Does the Afrofuture Say?” as an offering from her creative think tank and consultancy firm, the Afrofuture Strategies Institute. She once again reached out to Phillips, along with a host of others, for a conversation, in early April, about the impact of COVID-19 on the Black community.

Ingrid LaFleur, forty-two, is a curator, artist, Afrofuturist, and pleasure activist—by which she means she has “developed a pleasure principle to bring more joy into [her] life… and resonate that pleasure deep into the future.” She spent the first ten years of her career making a name for herself in the international arts scene, and in 2010 she returned to her hometown of Detroit to invest the fruits of that experience. She has accomplished this in projects such as her Afrofuturist arts, film, and book club series, Afrotopia; the Decolonize Your Destiny podcast, which she started in 2019 as a road map to self-sovereignty and liberation through the daily practice of decolonization; and DINKINESH, her pop-up boutique specializing in Afrofuturist cultural production.