BADS_lab

BLACK ARTS & DECOLONIAL SCIENCES

A social practice vehicle guided by a kinmaking ethos, a world-building practice, and a wayfinding aesthetic, BADS_lab is an experimental space where artists and researchers committed to decoloniality can commune with one another—without a predetermined telos or fixed end goal, apart from the act of communing itself.

BADS_lab gathers together artists, philosophers, scientists, technologists, and organic intellectuals who are committed to and intent upon (i) deconstructing the colonial practices of brutalization and specialization that have entrenched themselves in the modern techno-scientific imagination, and (ii) (re-)constructing “other-whys” that enable scientists and technologists to approach beings otherwise than brutalizing and specializing them.

The "brute matter" and “brute facts" of Colonial Science are not givens: they are made by Colonial Science via processes of "brutalization”.

Colonizers submit beings to scientific study because they intend to brutalize them -- that is, to make efficient use of force as they endeavor to disintegrate us, to break us down into bits, to transform us into perversely pleasurable and profitable datum for collection and consumption.

It is only when beings resist brutalization in remarkable ways that Colonial Science calls in the specialists in complexity, chaos, and indeterminacy as reinforcements, for the purposes of risk management and damage control. Colonial Science then endeavors to marginalize those beings that are remarkable for resisting brutalization, writing them off as special cases, as cases for specialized know-how, and rendering them inaccessible to the multitudes.

BADS_lab invites fugitive planners and fugitive publics to prototype means and ends to render resistance multitudinous and heighten and deepen the general antagonism against colonial practices of brutalization and specialization.

BADS_lab is a partnership between Fyrthyr Institute and the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines.

BADS_lab 2025

Galeria do Reggae, São Paulo — Sept 2–9, 2025

Black: Cite; Sight–Site is a layered, participatory exploration of Afro-diasporic world-making practices launching in São Paulo, Fall 2025. Refusing the pathologization of Black relationality, the project aims to redirect financial, material, and libidinal investments toward its flourishing. Convening artists, theorists, and community leaders, it explores Black life as a generative infrastructure of autonomy, memory, relation, and sustainability.

During its São Paulo iteration, Black: Cite; Sight–Site will transform Galeria do Reggae into a living research node: a site of ethico-aesthetic inquiry at the intersection of Black Arts and Decolonial Science.

Seven BADS_lab Fellows will be invited initiate new research projects not as finished artworks, but as sketches, trials, and speculative experiments—improvising toward forms not yet known.

Over six days of shared time:

Fellows will develop works-in-progress — solo or collaboratively — within a hybrid studio-lab.
Closed studio hours will offer space for focused work, co-presence, and quiet cross-pollination.
Open studio hours will invite the public to witness, question, and engage the unfolding process.
Structured conversations with professional art critique will braid together fellow residents and public interlocutors.
A final showcase will present reflections, fragments, and findings — not as conclusions, but as offerings toward ongoing study.

Learn More

Scenes from

BADS_lab 2024

Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago — May 10–20, 2024

Ladipo Famodu

Jared Brown

Nimrod Astarhan

Letaru Dralega

2024 BADS_lab Fellows

Jared Brown

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Jared broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah's description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, performance, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. Jared Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.
Ladipo Famodu

Ladipo Famodu is an artist, designer, chemist, and capoeirista. He is interested in kinaesthetic learning, where knowledge is exchanged through the manipulation of objects, or by moving one's body. Much of his work employs playfulness and surrealism in an attempt to undo the tethered logics of anti-blackness and modernity. He is currently working with wire sculpture, performance, and fine jewelry.
Ladipo received an MA in Design from the Sandberg Instituut (2022), and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota (2015). He was a recipient of the Holland Scholarship, and has been awarded a SPARK grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition. His work has been shown at the South Side Community art Center, Museum of Science and Industry, and he has contributed to the German Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. His writing has been featured in The Funambulist, and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Ladipo is currently based in Chicago.
Letaru Dralega

Letaru Dralega is a Ugandan Jamaican British artist and researcher interested in the material/immaterial dichotomy, particularly in African and Afrodiasporic ontologies. She experiments with collage, painting, installation, and sound to examine themes of memory, belonging, and the postcolonial condition.
A social scientist by training she holds a Master of International Development with African studies (2019) from Sciences Po Paris, France. She co-founded Afropocene Studio Lab, an interdisciplinary research space in Kampala dedicated to exploring the cultural aesthetics and philosophies of science that are borne of the developing intersection of African/Afro-diaspora culture with technology. She co-directs Afropocene: The Capsule, an Independent public art platform established in 2023 to promote experimental, immersive, and alternative exhibition formats in Kampala.
Nimrod Astarhan

Nimrod Astarhan is an artist, technologist, and educator. Their practice is based on a post-conceptual approach toward sculpture, installation, and media art, utilizing collaborations, digital technology, and electronic mechanisms. Their research-creation involves activating non-visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum contextualized through material, diasporic, historical, and philosophical lenses. They exhibited and initiated group projects in Europe, the US, and the International Space Station. Recent showings include the Gwangju Biennial Pavilion Project, Ars Electronica, The Ammerman Center Biennial Symposium on Arts & Technology, Die Digitale Düsseldorf, and xCoAx in Graz, Austria. Last year, they received grants and awards from the Municipal Arts League of Chicago and the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago, among others. Nimrod holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they teach at the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department, alongside their position at the Multidisciplinary Art School at Shenkar College of Engineering, Art, and Design.