If the nation-state is so closely tethered to colonial-capitalist governmental logics, would decolonization then, if followed through to its radical conclusion, necessitate the abolition of the nation-state form? If so, how might anarchically orientated anti-colonial struggles be enabled by the strategic appropriation and cosmological reinvention of digital technologies for collective diasporic study, political mobilization and organizing, and planetarily extended anti-capitalist infrastructural transformations?

This talk departs from a stream of questions and propositions developed on the occasion of Traces of Ecstasy, a transatlantic research and curatorial project initiated by curator, writer and theorist KJ Abudu. Exploring the material contradictions and metaphysical intricacies of what Abudu frames as the Afri-technological question, the talk looks at the militant uses of technology in past and present African and Third World liberation struggles and grapples with the cosmological stakes of challenging Western overrepresentations of technical invention and computational reasoning.

KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and scholar-critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anti-colonial/imperial critique, black radical thought, and indigenous philosophies, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices that respond to the world-historical conditions produced by racial/colonial-capitalist modernity. Abudu recently curated Traces of Ecstasy at the 4th Lagos Biennial and the ICA at VCU, Richmond (2024). He is currently Associate Curator at Swiss Institute, New York, where he has curated exhibitions including Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns (for which he convened the Black Earth Study Club) (2025); Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up (2025); and Kobby Adi: Cloisters & Instruments (2024). Other exhibitions include Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York (2023) and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, and Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2022). His writings have been featured in e-flux, Mousse, Frieze, and numerous other art publications and museum catalogues.