Toronto’s downtown core feels like a city of the near-future these days. There’s the condo boom that, as someone said to me recently, makes Toronto feel like Gotham City on a sunny day; more and more surfaces are being used as a canvas for the bright barrage of shiny advertising, like a futuristic cautionary tale about corporatism and consumption; and there’s buildings you’ve long suspected are alien spaceships in disguise. Point is, Toronto lends itself to sci-fi imaginings, so it’s not surprising when Danilo the Artist says that he thinks Toronto could be a capital of Afrofuturism.

It’s one of the reasons he curated Black Future Month 3014 at Daniels Spectrum in Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood. It is the first ever Afrofuturism group show in Toronto, bringing together artists who may or may not see their work as Afrofuturist. Coined in 1993, it’s often a retrospective label, something used to corral together disparate projects.

For Danilo, it is the only movement with which he identifies his work. A lover of science fiction from childhood, much of his artistic work consists of, in his words, “space shit.” On the other hand, Javid Jah, another featured artist, considers Afrofuturism an external, curatorial label. Yet Danilo identified in all the artists an “Afrofuturist flavour” which compelled him to include them in the show.

The nature of an Afrofuturist flavor was up for discussion during the artist panel. Moderated by Hillina Seife, it included SoTeeOh, Komi Olaf, Samson Brown, Quentin Vercetty, Chris Ak, Chanel Kennebrew, Javid Jah, Ola Ojo and Danilo, whose works are either featured in the show or who have been otherwise involved. What came through was the future as a canvas on which to project visions culled from black history, contemporary society and fantastical technology. Afrofuturism: where the future is mythological.

As Quentin Vercetty commented, those futuristic visions are often more about ideology and spirituality than technicalities. Jordan Clarke’s “Balance,” for example, is set nowhere and notime in particular. The figure’s yogic pose, meditative calm, open eyes and the halo around her head suggests holy transcendence firmly rooted in the space she occupies. It’s got the flavour. The Terra Archipelago Infrastructural Commune (TAIC) Project by Ola Ojo, on the other hand, is set in a very specific location. It is architectural planning to address desertification in North Africa. Ojo took architecture to be a biomimetic technology, potentially with a life of its own. The project looks futuristic, but it’s meant for implementation now. TAIC may be the exhibition’s response to one panelist’s observation that any vision of the future depends on what we do now.

Large-scale forward planning is an especially relevant topic in Regent Park, where the exhibition is held, as the neighbourhood’s future is under construction. Originating in the late 1940s, the area was Canada’s first social housing project, and is currently about half-way through a 15-year revitalization project.

I recently spoke to SoTeeOh, a Toronto street photographer and one of BFM 3014’s artists and panelists, about what’s going on in Regent Park and how to understand BFM 3014 within it. Originally expecting a short response to use as research for this article, it was soon clear there was no point in rewording what SoTeeOh said so well.