We had another fine evening of Afrofuturism at The Watershed last night. The event was introduced by Ytasha Womack, inevitably, and by a new voice to me, Ingrid LaFleur. Ingrid is an Afrofuturist art critic, and for me the most interesting things she said were about using Afrofuturism to help with the revitalization of Detroit. Was she at DetCon 1? She should have been.

We began with a short film by the Kenyan artist, Wangechi Mutu. Again I had not heard of her before (except doubtless in passing while reading the art section of Ytasha’s book too quickly). Edson had brought in some books of her work, and I was totally blown away. If you are in London, she has an exhibition on at the moment at Victoria Miro. And if you are not some of the pieces in the exhibition are available on the Guardian website. I note that people often seem to use the word “cyborg” in connection with Mutu’s work. Donna Haraway should be proud.

The film by Mutu was The End of Eating Everything. It is around 8 minutes long. Part of it is available on YouTube. The part of the monster is played by the musician, Santigold.

The main film of the night was Black Sci-Fi, a BBC documentary from 1992 which features Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, Mike Sargent and Nichelle Nichols. Chip and Octavia were on fire. I wanted to tweet just about everything they said. Sadly I wasn’t anywhere near fast enough. You can see some clips from the film at this Tor.com post. Unfortunately for you it doesn’t include the best bits in which Chip reads from Dhalgren against a background of deserted and derelict parts of New York. (Of course that does mean that you don’t see how the BBC managed to mis-spell Chip’s name in the titling, but so it goes.)

The Tor.com post says that the film has been lost, but it hasn’t. It is just unobtainable unless you have the sort of access to the BFI archives that The Watershed has. We had a unique opportunity to see an incredibly rare documentary featuring two of science fiction’s greatest writers. And the cinema was almost empty. Well, that’s your fault, Bristol. I saw it, and you didn’t.