In a performative talk with additional improvised sound on Ableton, manuel arturo abreu explores quantum aesthetics by means of Wilson Harris’s quantum fiction, in particular his concept of the Carib bone flute as a counter-narrative to the Catholic eucharist and the tyranny of predatory coherence in western cultures. Carib warriors would make a flute from the bone of a respected enemy and bring it to their lips to silently play it or pretend to play it. The ritual consumption of the bone is thought to make one stronger, as one ingests the secrets of the enemy’s power. This ritual and its silent sounds sit in opposition to Catholic transubstantiation where the wine and cracker, despite accidents of appearance, truly function as the flesh and blood of Christ. 

Within Harris’s quantum fiction, the art produced by the Caribbean imagination has nonlinear temporal agency, breaking the ‘seal’ of colonial linear time and reaching back to the omens of capacity latent in the clash of civilizations and suppressed tactics and ontologies of resistance. This infinite rehearsal of entangled forces, frictions, fictions, fissures, and forces allows for a Caribbean perspective on quantum aesthetics. In light of this, abreu considers figures like Matsuzawa Yutaka, Pauline Oliveros, and Anicka Yi, as well as collectives like Black Quantum Futurism and Don and Moki Cherry’s album Organic Music Theatre (1972),  among others.

As Wilson summarizes in his History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (1970): ‘… the waves of action stemming from many movements and continents since the European Renaissance have come so thick and fast that “realism” becomes, in itself, a dead-end, and the need begins to dawn for a drama of consciousness which reads back though the shock of place and time for omens of capacity, for thresholds of capacity that were latent, unrealised, within the clash of cultures and movements of peoples into the South Americas and the West Indies.’