Fela to the Future

CLOSING NIGHT OF:

Minor Attractions

Friday 17 October 2025
The Mandrake Hotel, 
Newman Street, London

Afterparty: Jumbi, 76 Rye Lane, Peckham SE15 5DQ

Press Contact: hpryceparchment@gmail.com, dani@deeceedeecee.com

Lemi Ghariokwu, Dele Sosimi, Rikki Stein, Dial-An-Ancestor, Midnightswami, ODERA, Fat-Lip, Sibhale Serpent Daniel, Adza Tarka, Tayo Rapoport, Rohan Ayinde



Visit/RSVP
Entry to Minor Attractions is free — but spaces are limited, so please RSVP here:

          RSVP

After-party at Jumbi:
Doors open at 10 pm. Entry is £7 on the door.

 Come early, stay late.


Curatorial statement

Ishy Pryce-pARCHMENT 
& dANIELLA chUKWUEZI




Fela Kuti:
“Music is the weapon of the future.”
     “Music is the weapon of the future.” These words of Fela Anikulapo Kuti set the tone for Fela to the Future, a special programme as part of the Minor Attractions Fair unfolding during Frieze Week 2025. 
       More than a musician, Fela was a revolutionary force—a cultural theorist, community-builder, and fearless critic of power. This programme reimagines his radical vision across past, present, and future tenses, drawing on Afrofuturism, diasporic aesthetics, and decolonial imagination as portals for new worlds to come.
        Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Felabration and 28 years since Fela’s passing, Fela to the Future explores how music translates into visual practice, and how Fela’s sound, politics, and aesthetics continue to reverberate across generations.


Programme Overview


The evening unfolds through film, installation, conversation, and performance—bringing together artists, musicians, and thinkers who extend Fela’s legacy through sound, image, and imagination.

The Basement 6PM - 7PM:
Short Film Programme
    The evening unfolds through film, installation, conversation, and performance. A shorts programme gathers emerging filmmakers whose works resonate with Fela’s decolonial imagination and sonic politics.
        Iwoyi: within the echo (2024), directed by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde, layers original footage, archival material, and poetry to explore Black British music as a site of diasporic feeling and futurity. 

       Practices in Building Black Queer Futurity (2025), by Sibahle Serpent Daniel, re-edited specially for this screening, uses generative AI, poetry, and voice to interrogate the future of Black queer being.

       REVO (2025), by Savannah Fuller (fat-lÏp), revisits the 1979 Grenada Revolution through archival montage and a soundtrack that fuses reggae and resistance.

        for kalakuta&kofifi (2025), by midnightswami, collages found footage, improvised sound, and drawing to link the military destruction of Lagos’s Kalakuta Republic and Johannesburg’s Kofifi, excavating the sonic genealogies of Afrobeat and Marabi.

        TIMELINEALCHEMY (2025), by Tamika Abaka-Wood, experiments with sonic time-travel as a mode of resistance and remembrance.

       A theme-specific work by ODERA will extend the programme’s conversation on diasporic sound and speculative histories through film. 




The Basement 7PM - 8PM:
Panel conversation
    bringing together those who knew Fela best:
        A special panel talk reunites those who knew Fela best—visual artist Lemi Ghariokwu, manager Rikki Stein, and keyboardist Dele Sosimi—to explore the intersections of music, politics, and visual culture, and to reflect on how Fela’s legacy continues to shape creative resistance today.



Hotel-wide from 6PM:
Installations & Activations
    Beyond the screen, installations and participatory activations extend Fela’s ethos into collective space.
        Adza Tarka’s 9jafuturhythmachine: soro soke is an interactive multimedia installation—combining sculpture, textbook, and performance video—that reflects on how history is made through acts of remembrance and forgetting. Expanding on Tarka’s DIY electronic instrument 9jafuturhythmachine: (re)sampler, the work explores how interactive theatre can memorialise Nigerian protest histories, especially the 2020 #EndSARS movement and the Lekki Tollgate Massacre. “Soro soke,” Yoruba for “speak up,” becomes a sonic call for accountability, amplifying both embodied and institutional memory.

       Tamika Abaka-Wood’s DIAL-AN-ANCESTOR is a long-term participatory audio installation activated by ancestors past, present, and future through their voices. Call (toll-free; carrier charges may apply) or visit www.dial-an-ancestor.com to listen, record, or contribute to the living archive. “You are somebody’s ancestor. What do you have to say?” The installation invites audiences to join a century-spanning conversation on inheritance, transmission, and sonic continuity.  



from 6PM:
Workshops & Performance        The programme continues with Turn by Turn, a vinyl DJ workshop by ETP and sweetestcape, offering participants a hands-on engagement with the craft and community of sound-making. A live performance by Dele Sosimi and his Quintet brings the night to a crescendo, translating Fela’s revolutionary frequencies into the present tense, followed by an afterparty at Jumbi, Peckham—a celebration of rhythm, resistance, and joy.

   


Information
       To speak of Fela today is to invoke a decolonial imagination. His work confronted the enduring logics of empire—colonial borders, cultural imperialism, extractive capitalism, state violence—and transformed them into energy for resistance and creation. Afrobeat, as both form and philosophy, reclaims tradition while inventing the new, dismantling imported frameworks while amplifying voices from the ground up. Fela to the Future invites us to listen forward—to imagine what liberation might sound, look, and feel like next.

          Join us across two iconic london venues for Fela to the Future x Minor Attractions Closing Night as we revisit Fela’s radical legacy to ask what lessons his music, politics, and aesthetics can teach us about building the futures we want.



        Date and Time
17 October 2025

        Minor attractions Activations:
12pm - 10:30pm
The Mandrake, London, W1T 1PG

        Jumbi Afterparty:
10PM - 2Am
Jumbi Peckham, London, SE15 3SN


        Minor Attractions 
Minor Attractions is a week-long art fair hosted at The Mandrake Hotel inviting global commercial galleries and not-for-profit art spaces, founded in 2023. The fair is designed as a space where art and nightlife meet, allowing the swells of international collectors in the city to mingle with the art workers and artists that make the art world tick. 


       The Mandrake
An award-winning five-star boutique hotel in Fitzrovia, the venue hosts eight terrace bedrooms and various common areas, gallery booths and exhibition spaces. The Mandrake Hotel has been the home for Minor Attractions Frieze Week Fair for four years in a row. 


        Jumbi
A Hi-Fi Music Bar & Restaurant in the heart of Peckham celebrating the sounds & flavours of the African-Caribbean diaspora.

     



Visit/RSVP
Entry to Minor Attractions is free — but spaces are limited, so please RSVP here:

            RSVP

After-party at Jumbi:
Doors open at 10 pm. Entry is £7 on the door.

 Come early, stay late.
Support us
This is a free event. Here you will find a link to donate to our fundraiser to support our programme and fund our work. Donations for any size are very much welcome.

            DONATE